Research on neck dissection for oral squamous-cell carcinoma: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Neck dissection for oral squamous-cell carcinoma (OSCC) is a clinically controversial issue and has therefore been the subject of abundant research. However, no one has performed a bibliometric study on this topic to date. The aim of this study was to assess the development of research on neck dissection for OSCC in terms of the historical evolution, current hotspots and future directions, particularly including research trends and frontiers from 2010 to 2019. Literature records related to research on neck dissection for OSCC were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). CiteSpace was used as a tool to perform a bibliometric analysis of this topic. The survey included 2 096 papers. "Otorhinolaryngology" was the most popular research area. The most active institutions and countries were Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the USA, respectively. Shah J.P. was the most cited author. Among the six identified "core journals", Head & Neck ranked first. The top three trending keywords were 'invasion', 'upper aerodigestive' and 'negative neck'. 'D'Cruz AK (2015)' was the most cited and the strongest burst reference in the last decade. The study evaluated the effect on survival of elective versus therapeutic neck dissection in patients with lateralized early-stage OSCC. The depth of invasion and the management of N0 OSCC were research frontiers in this field. The present study provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of research on neck dissection for OSCC, which will assist investigators in exploring potential research directions.

Fig. 1

The distribution of publications and their citations from 1976 to 2019. The accumulative numbers of publications and their citations grew slowly in the early stage, whereas an apparent and qualitative leap occurred from 2010 to 2019

Fig. 2

The co-occurrence network of keywords related to research on neck dissection for OSCC from 2010 to 2019. The whole network comprises 100 nodes and 109 links. Each node represents a keyword, and each link between two nodes represents the co-occurrence relationship between two keywords. The size of the node represents the frequency of the keyword. As shown, ‘squamous cell carcinoma’ was the largest node, and its outer purple ring indicated high centrality. All keywords were divided into 11 clusters from #0 to #10 with the respective label, which reflected the topic of the respective cluster

Fig. 3

Timeline view of co-cited references related to neck dissection for OSCC from 2010 to 2019. Each node represents a cited reference, and each link between two nodes represents the co-citation relationship between two references. The size of the node represents the citation count of the reference. All references were divided into 6 clusters from #0 to #5 with diverse labels. Based on the publication year of each reference, cluster #5 labelled with ‘depth of invasion’ was the latest (mean year = 2011), reflecting the research trends and frontiers in this field