Thematic trends and knowledge structure map of sentinel lymph node biopsy for breast cancer: a bibliometric analysis from 2010 to 2019

BACKGROUND: Breast cancer is the leading cancer-related deaths among women. Although great progress has been made in clinical surgical treatment, it is still urgently needed to look for a treatment model with smaller wounds, lower damage, and a better prognosis. Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) is a minimally invasive technique for breast cancer treatment, which can correctly assess the patients’ condition, prognosis, and treatment response. METHODS: We performed a PubMed-based bibliometric analysis to investigate publication trends of SLNB in breast cancer and determined the annual distribution of annual publication numbers, countries, authors, languages, journals, and high-frequency major Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms. RESULTS: The results showed that the literature on SLNB in breast cancer has shown an upward trend, and stabilized with the most English literature in the past decade at least. The United States was the country with the most publications from 2010 to 2019. M Ahemd was the first-author who had published the most documents related to SLNB in breast cancer since 2010. The most high-frequency main MeSH words were breast neoplasms/pathology, breast neoplasms/surgery and SLNB. CONCLUSIONS: Through bicluster analysis, we divided the related articles of SLNB in breast cancer field from 2010 to 2019 into 4 clusters. Among them, indications for SLNB in breast cancer and detection of lymph node metastases and tracking methods for SLNB were considered to be current research hotspots, while assessment of axillary lymph nodes in neoadjuvant chemotherapy and application of SLNB was a potential hotspot.