JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Tyrosinase inhibitors (TKIs) have achieved revolutionary results in the treatment of a wide range of tumors, which have brought out a lot of literature in this field every year. And some reviews provide a great value for us to understand TKIs. However, there is a lack of studies on the knowledge structure and bibliometric analysis in TKIs research.

Objective:

This paper aims to investigate the knowledge structure, hotspots, and trends of evolution of the field of TKIs by co-word analysis and literature visualization.

Methods:

We obtained all academic papers about TKIs published in 2016-2020 from the Web of Science. Based on counting keywords from those papers, we generated the co-word networks by extracting the co-occurrence relationships between keywords, and segmented communities to identify the sub-directions of TKIs research by calculating the network metrics of the overall and local networks. We also mapped the association network topology, including the network within and between TKIs sub-directions, to reveal the association and structure among varied sub-directions. Finally, evolution venation and strategic diagram were generated to reveal the trends of TKIs research.

Results:

We obtained 6,782 unique words (total frequency 26,175) from 5,584 paper captions. Finally, 296 high-frequency words were selected with a threshold of 10 after discussion, the total frequency of which accounted for 65.41%. The analysis of burst disciplines revealed a variable number of burst words of TKIs research every year, especially in 2019 and 2020, such as HER2, Pyrotinib, Next-generation Sequencing, Immunotherapy, ALK-TKI, ALK Rearrangement, etc. By network calculation, the TKIs co-word network was divided into six communities: C1-Non-small Cell Lung Cancer, C2-Targeted Therapy, C3-Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, C4-HER2, C5-Pharmacokinetics, and C6-ALK. The venation diagram revealed several clear and continuous evolution trends, such as Non-small Cell Lung Cancer venation, Chronic Myeloid Leukemia venation, Renal Cell Carcinoma venation, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia venation, etc. In the strategic diagram, C1-Non-small Cell Lung Cancer was the core direction located in the first quadrant, C2-Targeted Therapy was exactly at the junction of the first and fourth quadrants that meant C2 was developing, and C3-Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, C4-HER2, and C5-Pharmacokinetics were all immature that all located in the third quadrant.

Conclusions:

Using co-word analysis and literature visualization, we revealed the hotspots, knowledge structure, and trends of evolution of TKIs research during 2016-2020. TKIs research mainly focused on targeted therapies against varied tumors, particularly against NSCLC. The attention on CML and pharmacokinetics was gradually decreasing, but the heat of HER2 and ALK was rapidly increasing. TKIs research had shown a clear development path: TKIs research was disease-focused and revolved around "gene targets/targeted drugs/resistance mechanisms". Our outcomes will provide sound and effective support to researchers, funders, policymakers, and clinicians.