Status Quo and Research Trends of Craniopharyngioma Research: A 10-Year Bibliometric Analyses (From 2011 to 2020)

BACKGROUND: Craniopharyngioma (CP) is a challenging intracranial tumor due to its special hypothalamus-pituitary location. Each patient with CP should be evaluated and treated separately. Exploring novel methods of automatized analysis of data for gaining knowledge on any medical field is an encouraging task, particularly in such an extremely challenging tumor as CP. We aim to summary the situations, investigate the research trends and evaluate research hotspots using bibliometric analysis for the CP research. METHODS: We extracted all the CP-related literatures from 2011 to 2020 from the Web of Science database. An Online analysis platform of literature metrology (Bibliometric), BICOMB, gCLUTO and CiteSpace softwares were used to do bibliometric analysis. As a supplement, we also analyzed the top 100 cited case reports with particular and certainly infrequent information to improve the analysis. RESULTS: According to our retrieval strategy, we found a total of 1262 CP-related literatures. The United States has maintained a leading position in global CP research, followed by China and Germany. Among institutions, Capital Med Univ, St Jude Childrens Res Hosp and Southern Med Univ rank in the top 3 in terms of the number of articles published. “WORLD NEUROSURGERY” is the most popular journal for CP-related research. Moreover, MULLER HL, MERCHANT TE, QI ST and others have made great achievements in the study of CP. Finally, we did biclustering analysis on keywords and identified 4 CP research hotspot clusters. CONCLUSIONS: Our research provides a comprehensive analysis of the scientific progress of CP in the past 10 years, and insight into the development of CP research field, highlight research trends over time, and help identify valuable future directions.