Bibliometric analysis of oncology communication from 1976 to 2025: a focus on narrative medicine

Clinical communication in oncology has become a central component of supportive cancer care, with direct implications for symptom management, psychosocial distress, decision-making, caregiver support, survivorship, and palliative transitions. This bibliometric analysis examined 949 documents indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection between 1976 and 2025 in order to map the field's intellectual structure, publication profile, and thematic development. The study combined PRISMA-guided corpus construction with bibliometric techniques including co-citation analysis, thematic clustering, and strategic mapping. The results show sustained growth across five decades, but also a distributed publication profile, moderate international collaboration, and only partial integration across citation communities. A major transition occurred between 2005 and 2007, when communication began to be framed less as information transfer and more as a therapeutic and relational component of care. Within this structure, narrative medicine remains visible mainly as a conceptual orientation rather than as a consolidated methodological line. Thematic development is stronger in psychosocial, patient-centered, and palliative communication than in digitally mediated, developmentally specific, participatory, or structurally informed approaches. Overall, the findings position oncology communication as an established but still uneven component of supportive care, with practical implications for multidisciplinary teams in nursing, psycho-oncology, social work, and palliative care.