Visual Analysis and Focused Areas of Immunotherapy for Liver Cancer Based on Literature Data

Objective To compare the research status and hotspots of immunotherapy for liver cancer at home and abroad.

Methods Papers about immunotherapy for liver cancer published from the establishment to 2019 were searched in PubMed database and Chinese database. Information were extracted and sorted by BICOMB-2 software, and then we created the word matrix and co-occurrence matrix of high-frequency subject headings. The cluster analysis of subject headings was conducted by gCLUTO 1.0. NetDraw 2.089 was used to draw social network diagrams, UCINET 6.212 was used to conduct the centrality analysis.

Results There were 2 081 foreign literatures and 901 Chinese literatures, involving 655 foreign periodicals and 275 Chinese periodicals. Four themes of immunotherapy for liver cancer were determined: the correlation between the immune inoculation of hepatitis B patients and the occurrence of liver cancer, the study between dendritic cells and immunotherapy for liver cancer, the study of the combination of radiotherapy and immunotherapy on liver cancer, and related research of natural killer cells and liver cancer immunotherapy.

Conclusion The number of researches on immunotherapy for liver cancer have shown an increasing trend year by year. We can learn from the international research status and hotspots to create a new way for liver cancer treatment.