Evolution of Immunotherapy for Ovarian Cancer from a Bird’s-Eye Perspective: A Text-Mining Analysis of Publication Trends and Topics

OBJECTIVES: Ovarian tumors are among the most prominent gynecological malignancies and have a poor prognosis. Immunotherapy has undergone incredible progress in the past two decades. Our study aimed to use a bibliometric approach to identify research trends in ovarian cancer immunotherapy. METHODS: Literature on this topic published from 2000–2020 was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Citation database and analyzed using the bibliometric analysis software VOSviewer and CiteSpace. RESULTS: A total of 1729 articles on ovarian cancer immunotherapy published from January 2000 to December 2020 were identified. The number of published articles increased each year, from 40 in 2000 to 209 in 2020. These publications were from 61 countries, and the USA showed a dominant position in publication output, total citations, and average number of citations per paper. Co-citation networks revealed 14 subtopics. ‘PD-L1 expression,’ ‘tumor reactive til,’ and ‘parp inhibitor’ are the current potential subtopics. Furthermore, we determined research trends according to the timeline analysis. CONCLUSION: Our study exhaustively describes the development and summarizes the research trends of ovarian cancer immunotherapy over the past 20 years.