Global Research Trends in Gastric Cancer Epigenetics From 2005 to 2025

Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common malignant tumors in the digestive tract, characterized by a high degree of malignancy and a poor prognosis. Complex disease heterogeneity, late diagnosis, and suboptimal treatment often lead to poor prognoses for patients. In addition to genetic alterations and environmental factors, changes in epigenetic mechanisms also play an important role in the occurrence and progression of GC. Revealing the current research status of epigenetics in GC has important guiding significance for the diagnosis and treatment of GC, as well as for future research directions.

In this study, we used specific keywords to search for publications related to gastric cancer epigenetics (GCE) published in the past 20 years in the Web of Science Core Collection database. The VOSviewer software (Version 1.6.20; Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands) was used to conduct clustering and co-occurrence analysis on countries, authors, institutions, and keywords in the publications. CiteSpace software (Version 6.3.1R6; Chaomei Chen, College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA) was used for burst analysis and timeline clustering analysis.

A total of 4,655 papers on GC in the field of epigenetics were retrieved. China is the country with the largest number of published papers (n = 1,876), while the United States has the highest centrality (0.32). Nanjing University ranks first among all institutions in terms of the number of published papers (n = 175). The author Ushijima Toshikazu from Japan has the highest number of published papers (n = 48). Yuan Yuan is a representative author of the recent research hotspots. In the keyword ranking, keywords related to DNA methylation are relatively numerous. Tumor microenvironment and immune infiltration are key buzzwords with research potential.

Based on bibliometric methods, this study provides new insights into the research progress of GC from the perspective of epigenetics and offers new ideas and inspirations for future GC research.