50 years of radiotherapy research: Evolution, trends and lessons for the future

Rapid and relentless technological advances in an ever-more globalized world have shaped the field of radiation oncology in which we practise today. These developments have drastically modified the habitus¹ of health professionals and researchers at an individual and organisational level. In this article we present an analysis of trends in radiation oncology research over the last half a century. To do so, the data from >350,000 scientific publications pertaining to a yearly search of the PubMed database with the keywords cancer radiotherapy was analysed. This analysis revealed that, over the years, radiotherapy research output has declined relative to alternative cancer therapies, representing 64% in 1970 it decreased to 31% in 2019. Also, the pace of research has significantly accelerated with, in the last 15 years, a doubling in the number of articles published by the 10% most productive researchers. Researchers are also facing stronger competition today with a proportion of first authors that will never get to publish as a last author increasing steadily from 58% in 1970 to 84% in 2000. Additionally, radiotherapy research output is extremely unequally distributed in the world, with Africa and South America contributing to ∼3% of radiotherapy articles in 2019 while representing 23% of the world's population. This disparity, reflecting economic situations and radiotherapy capabilities, has a knock-on effect for the provision of routine clinical treatment. Since research activity is inherent to delivery of high quality clinical care, this contributes to the global inequity of radiotherapy services. Learning from these trends is crucial for the future not only of radiation oncology research but also for effective and equitable cancer care.