The global research and emerging trends in autophagy of pancreatic cancer: A bibliometric and visualized study

OBJECTIVE: To present the global research features and hotspots, and forecast the emerging trends by conducting a bibliometric analysis based on literature related to autophagy of pancreatic cancer from 2011 to 2022. METHODS: The literature data regarding autophagy of pancreatic cancer were retrieved and downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) from Clarivate Analytics on June 10th, 2022. VOSviewer (version 1.6.18) was used to perform the bibliometric analysis. RESULTS: A total of 616 studies written by 3993 authors, covered 45 countries and 871 organizations, published in 263 journals and co-cited 28152 references from 2719 journals. China (n=260, 42.2%) and the United States (n=211, 34.3%) were the most frequent publishers and collaborated closely. However, publications from China had a low average number of citations (25.35 times per paper). The output of University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center ranked the first with 26 papers (accounting for 4.2% of the total publications). Cancers (n=23, 3.7%; Impact Factor = 6.639) published most papers in this field and was very pleasure to accept related researches. Daolin Tang and Rui Kang published the most papers (n=18, respectively). The research hotspots mainly focused on the mechanisms of autophagy in tumor onset and progression, the role of autophagy in tumor apoptosis, and autophagy-related drugs in treating pancreatic cancer (especially combined therapy). The emerging topics were chemotherapy resistance mediated by autophagy, tumor microenvironment related to autophagy, autophagy-depended epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), mitophagy, and the role of autophagy in tumor invasion. CONCLUSION: Attention has been increasing in autophagy of pancreatic cancer over the past 12 years. Our results undoubtedly provide scholars with new clues and ideas in this field.