Entanglement between pharmacy/pharmaceutical education and cancer? A bibliometric answer

The growing role of pharmacists in cancer care highlights the need to understand research trends linking pharmaceutical education and oncology.

To quantitatively investigate the bibliometric status of the entanglement between pharmacy/pharmaceutical education and cancer-related issues, providing feasible information and suggestions for the developmental basis and research hotspots.

Bibliometric analysis was performed using the Web of Science Core Collection. Boolean operations (BO) were used to set up the literature query set. The literature published between 1985 and 2022 was screened for the types of "article" and "review." The citation analysis and research hotspot extraction were performed using the "analyze results" and "citation report" functions of Clarivate Analytics.

The bibliometric analysis of 722 relevant papers showed that the global interest in the topic is increasing and the collaboration between countries is quite active. The extraction results showed that guidelines for cancer therapy, palliative care and pain management, pharmacy staff's attitudes and knowledge, and adherence to chemotherapy were the main research hotspots and that these have been long-term discussed.

Conducting a bibliometric study to analyze the overall publication status, developmental basis, and research hotspots will reveal the logical entanglement of the existing academic research between pharmacy/pharmaceutical education and cancer, and will provide a reference for academic development in the educational and oncological community.