Response to “knowledge mapping of immunotherapy for breast cancer: A bibliometric analysis from 2013 to 2022: A correspondence”

This article responds to:

Knowledge mapping of immunotherapy for breast cancer: A bibliometric analysis from 2013 to 2022

Dear Editor,

We have reviewed the comments on our recently published manuscript “Knowledge mapping of immunotherapy for breast cancer: A bibliometric analysis from 2013 to 2022.”¹ provided by Bao et al. We appreciate their critical reading and comments, and we are glad to response to their questions on the purpose of academic discussion.

Bao et al. proposed that “After reading some articles, we think that when retrieving and screening articles, selecting all the subdatabases it contains may not be accurate for this research field. In comparison, SCI-Expanded is the most widely understood, utilized, and accepted sub-database. Therefore, we recommend that the author clearly specifies the sub-databases used in the retrieval strategy paragraph to ensure the accuracy of the retrieval process.” Firstly, we aimed to obtain more comprehensive literature data related to our research topic, and to obtain more scientific and reliable results. Our flowchart illustrates the search terms, types of articles, and language criteria. We believe that any literature meeting the search criteria should be included in the analysis, rather than excluding literature simply because it is included in other subdatabases of WoSCC. Secondly, we consulted the latest high-quality bibliometric analysis literature.^2–6 The majority of authors adopted a retrieval method consistent with ours, selecting the WoSCC database to retrieve literature.

Bao et al. argued that “Some researchers consider that Topic Search (TS) is not suitable for bibliometric analysis. The “Keywords Plus” generated by independent WoSCC under automatic computer algorithm is not closely related to the author. After reading some bibliometrics articles, we think that it should be more appropriate to use “TI”, “AB” and “AK” as retrieval criteria.” In the “Searching strategy and data collection” section of our article, we specified that TS includes title, abstract, author’s keywords, and keywords Plus. Additionally, Bao et al. suggested that “The author’s search strategy is relatively simple, and some related keywords may be omitted, resulting in no or too much retrieval of relevant publications.” When formulating our retrieval strategy, we referenced similar literature, including recent high-quality bibliometric analyses of immunotherapy-related literature, where many authors chose to use TS, consistent with our approach.^2,5,6 Using TS allows the retrieval equation to remain concise while conveying the same information.

There are some differences between the results obtained by Bao et al. and ours. In fact, we used different databases, search strategies, and data analysis software from those used by Bao et al., and the retrieval periods differed by approximately 10 months. We believe that these factors may contribute to the differences in results. Although there is no consensus on the formulation of retrieval strategies in bibliometric analysis, the retrieval strategy and analysis software we employed were based on previous research and are consistent with current mainstream literature analysis methods. It is evident that Bao et al.‘s opinion that their retrieval and analysis methods improved accuracy and comprehensiveness is not entirely objective. The literature data in our article is comprehensive, and the conclusions drawn are effective.

Thanks again for their comments. We will certainly take their advice into consideration when conducting similar analysis in the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Open Fund of Chongqing Key Laboratory for Intelligent Oncology in Breast Cancer [Grant No. 2023rxaznzlzdsys01], Chongqing Municipal Health and Health Commission [Grant No.2019NLTS005], Chongqing Research Institute Performance Incentive Guide Special Project and Beijing Science and Technology Innovation Medical Development Foundation [Grant No. KC2021-JF-0167-05].