Global research trends on epigenetics and cancer: A bibliometric analysis

Epigenetics in cancer has been a focus of intense research in the recent years. This phenomenon has attracted great interest because it offers potential targets for cancer therapy. To capture the intellectual landscape of this field, this article conducted a bibliometric analysis to assess the current status, frontiers and future trends of epigenetic research in cancers.

A bibliometric analysis was performed using data from the Web of Science Core Collection up to 2023. Analytical tools such as CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and the R package "bibliometrix" were employed for comprehensive data analysis and visualization. This process identified the publication of the articles, countries, authors, institutions, journals and keywords.

The results showed that there were 51,742 articles from the WoSCC database during 1985 to 2023 for cancer epigenetics. The number of epigenetic cancer-related publications has increased annually. The most contributed country is the United States, with 850,726 citations and 55 average article citations. China ranks second, with 413,386 citations and an average of 44.7. The most productive institutions were from the USA. Plos One (1020), International Journal of Molecular Sciences (957), and Cancers (945) were the top 3 contributing journals. The top 3 most common keywords were "DNA methylation," "expression" and "cancer." Research hotspots within these themes highlight intensive areas of study and the potential for significant breakthroughs.

This study presents an in-depth overview of the current state of epigenetics in cancers research. And the purpose of this review will be to understand the characteristics of bibliometric analyses of epigenetic cancers and anticipate the progress in understanding this field.