Handle on QoL corpus - a portrait of a maturing discipline

'Handle on QoL' is a unique, online, searchable database of all peer-reviewed papers, published since 1982, regarding health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in head and neck cancer. The aim of this paper is to benchmark our results on the Handle on QoL dataset, against four common bibliometric patterns - author productivity, journal concentration, team size, and the sequencing of growth and diffusion. In this paper, we performed a bibliometric analysis of the database to explore its contents and understand the development of research on HRQoL in head and neck cancer. Publication numbers were small in the 80s and 90s (<20 per year) showing a slow increase from the early 90s, before increasing rapidly from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. The number of authors per paper varied overall between one and 81, with a mean of 7.09 and median of six authors per paper. The top 10 journals, by volume of publications, accounted for 33.5% of all publications in the collected data. Integrating bibliometrics into the characterisation of Handle on QoL data transforms subjective patient reporting into objective and measurable insights. Researchers/clinicians may therefore define the field's scope, monitor real-time trends, and pinpoint critical gaps in knowledge.