Past and present: a bibliometric study on the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer

Background: Ovarian cancer (OC) is a gynecological malignancy with high mortality worldwide. The poor prognosis of OC is usually attributed to its recurrence-prone signature. Recently, mortality from OC has exhibited a downward trend. These favorable patterns likely find their main driving factor in advancements in novel therapeutic regimens. However, visualized analysis of the application of these new drugs on women with recurrent OC (ROC) is lacking. Therefore, we aimed to summarize changing paradigms in the ROC treatment using the bibliometric method. Methods Documents on ROC treatment were systematically collected from the MEDLINE database and Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC). The retrieved documents were exported in the plain text file format, and files were named and saved to the paths specified by the Java application. Microsoft Excel (version 2010), Citespace (6.2.R4) and VOSviewer (1.6.19) were used for data analysis and included the following: (1) annual publication trend; (2) contributions of countries, institutions and authors; (3) co-citation of journals and references; and (4) co-occurrence of keywords. Results A total of 914 documents published in the MEDLINE and 9,980 ones in WOSCC were retrieved. There has been an upward trend in the productivity of publications on ROC treatment on by years. The United States was the leading contributor in this field, and the University of Texas System was the most productive institution. Giovanni Scambia and Maurie Markman were the research leaders for ROC treatment. Gynecologic Oncology was the journal with most citation frequency. The reference entitled with “Niraparib Maintenance Therapy in Platinum-Sensitive, Recurrent Ovarian Cancer” got highest centrality of 0.14 in the co-citation network. Keyword analysis indicated that current treatment of ROC mainly focused on the platinum-based anticancer drugs, paclitaxel, angiogenesis inhibitors (AIs) and poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibitors (PARPis). Conclusion Scholars from all over the world have taken active part in the development of ROC treatment. International top journals and professional periodicals on gynecologic oncology have been the main sources of the hotspots and frontiers in this field. Maintenance treatment based on AIs or (and) PARPis has become an important adjunct to chemotherapy based on platinum agents and paclitaxel for ROC patients.