Global trends of researches on pycho-oncology during 1999-2019: A 21-year bibliometric study based on VOSviewer

Abstract

BackgroundThe studies on psycho-oncology are growing rapidly, but there were no bibliometric studies regarding psycho-oncology. This study was to explore a bibliometric analysis of psycho-oncology in the past 21 years at a global level.MethodsThe literature was searched in Web of Science (WOS) by using subject terms. VOSviewer software was used for bibliometric analysis of the retrieval results.ResultsThe literature search yielded 1921 papers. After screening process, 968 papers were included, which came from 55 countries/regions, 1,452 organizations and 4,152 authors. The top three countries/regions, organizations and authors ranked by the number of published papers were the United States of America (USA) (286), Germany (143) and Australia (130); the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre (MSKCC) (New York, USA) (34), Newcastle University (Newcastle, Australia) (29) and McGill University (Montreal, Canada) (28); Luigi Grassi (University of Ferrara in Italy) (26), Tatsuo Akechi (Nagoya City University Hospital in Japan) (20) and Anja Mehnert (University of Leipzig in Germany) (18), respectively. Moreover, the 968 papers contained 1,768 author keywords, involved in 300 journals and cited 28,311 references. The top three co-occurrence author keywords, most-involved journals and most-cited references were “Quality-of-life”, “Depression” and “Breast cancer”; Psycho-Oncology, Supportive Care in Cancer and Journal of Psychosocial Oncology; “Zigmond AS, 1983”, “Zabora J, 2001” and “Mitchell AJ, 2011”, respectively.ConclusionsThere was a growing trend in published papers related to psycho-oncology, with the organizations and authors from developed countries leading the field. “Quality-of-life”, “Depression” and “Breast cancer” reflected the most hotspots, and the latest progress can be tracked in Psycho-Oncology.