Tops and Trends in Iranian Cancer Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Detecting the main actors and important topics of Iranian cancer research is essential for Iranian policymakers, clinicians, and researchers. This study was conducted to demonstrate the trends and tops in Iranian cancer research from 1960 to 2018.

A total of 22,370 Iranian cancer articles in Web of Science (WoS), PubMed, and Scopus, from 1960 through 2018, were extracted and preprocessed based on data mining techniques and analyzed using the collaboration network analysis, keywords analysis, and bibliometrics methods.

The results reveal that, Tehran University of Medical Sciences (11.46%) among organizations, Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention (5%) among journals, Malekzadeh R (1.09%) among authors, and Breast cancer (10.37%) among topics ranked the first. The trend of Iranian cancer research represents three periods: 1) germinating period, from 1970 to 2000, 2) developing period, from 2002 to 2014, and 3) flourishing period, from 2014 to 2018. It is expected that this trend will continue. The results indicate an average 12.8% increase in the logarithm of the count of articles published by Iranian cancer researchers each year. The findings are contextualized with Price’s publications trends principal for determining global and Iranian cancer research publication trends.

The number of research papers published by Iranian researchers on cancer is increasing. In order to maintain the publication growth in this field, greater participation by other Iranian institutions is suggested. Although the quantity and quality of papers are increasing in some topics, certain topics and types of cancers should be still further studied and the Iranian policymakers should be encouraged to invest more in these topics.