Bibliometric study on the utilization of sorafenib in hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract

Background: Although the number of studies on sorafenib for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is increasing during the past two decades, no detailed scientometric examination of its knowledge framework has been undertaken. Therefore, we performed a bibliometric analysis on this topic.

Methods: VOSviewer and CiteSpace were utilized to analyze the articles regarding sorafenib for HCC from 2005 to 2024, which were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database.

Results: There were 7,667 articles related to sorafenib in HCC were retrieved from the WoSCC database, and they covered 99 countries/regions, 5,640 institutions, and 30,450 authors. The most published literature of countries and institutions were China and Sun Yat-sen University, respectively. Cancers is the journal with the most papers published in this field, and the journal with the most co-citations is N Engl J Med. Among authors, Masatoshi Kudo has published the most research papers, and the most co-citations go to JM Llovet. The keywords "survival", "apoptosis", "efficacy", "transarterial chemoembolization", "lenvatinib", etc. represent the current hotspots in this field.

Conclusions: We identified current hotspots and trends by bibliometric analysis in sorafenib-HCC field, which might provide valuable guidance for future researches. Further explorations are supposed to conduct the continued study of HCC apoptosis, large-scaled clinical trials with international cooperations, and comprehensive treatments including multiple systemic or locoregional approaches in patients with HCC.

Keywords: apoptosis; bibliometric analysis; hepatocellular carcinoma; liver cancer; sorafenib.

Figure 1

The flowchart of this study.

Figure 2

(A) Annual volume of publications. (B) Line graph of national publications. (C) Networks of country cooperation. (D) Networks of institutional co-operation.

Figure 3

(A) Density map of journal publications. (B) Co-citation network map of journals. (C) Dual map of journals: the colored tracks represent citation connections, with citing journals on the left and cited journals on the right.

Figure 4

(A) Cooperation network of authors. (B) Co-citation network of authors.

Figure 5

(A) Density map of keywords. (B) Network map of 178 high-frequency keywords that appeared at least 60 times; Cluster 1 (red) has 79 keywords, Cluster 2 (green) has 60 keywords, and Cluster 3 (blue) contains 39 keywords. (C) Peak map of keyword clustering. (D) Clustering map of keywords.

Figure 6

(A) Co-cited network of literature. (B) Clustering of co-cited literature. (C) Peak map of co-cited literature. (D) Bursting list of cited literature.