Keywords, Hotspots, and Trend Topics
Author keywords and keywords plus for 3907 publications were included in our analysis.
By analyzing the author keywords of the publications of CRS and NPs during the past 20 years, we obtained 5138 author keywords, of which 233 appeared ten times or more. Then, we sorted these author keywords according to the average publication year of the corresponding articles and counted the occurrences and the average citations (Supplementary table 6). Based on these, we made a reasonable judgment of the frontiers and hotspots in the research of CRS and NPs.
As shown in the table, we presented the 20 author keywords with the latest average publication year, which represented the frontiers of research in this field in the last three years, with ”Covid-19”, ”Biologic”, ”Benralizumab”, ”Dupilumab”, and ”Reslizumab” in the top 5. Covid-19 attracted significant attention throughout the medical field as a currently prevalent infectious disease. In addition, the other four author keywords in the top 5 indicated that the research of CRS and NPs focused on biologic treatments. Benralizumab, dupilumab, and reslizumab are monoclonal antibodies to IL-5R, IL-4R, and IL-5, respectively, the biologics currently approved worldwide for allergic diseases such as asthma and atopic dermatitis [24-25]. It proved that biologics and monoclonal antibodies were attracting much attention from researchers in CRS and NPs [26-27]. In addition, we highlight the author keywords with >50 occurrences. We found that ”biologics” (n=84), ”crswnp” (n=82), ” dupilumab” (n=77), ”type 2 inflammation” (n=69), ”omalizumab” (n=55) showed a high number of occurrences in the frontier articles, which may mean that these are the hotspots of research in recent years.
We plotted the hotspot diagram of author keywords with ≥10 occurrences (Supplementary figure 5) and the relationship network diagram between these keywords (Figure 4A). The hotspot diagram can visually determine the frequency of keyword occurrences, with darker colors representing higher occurrences. In the keywords network diagram, a thicker line means a stronger connection between the two, and the color represents the average occurrence year of that keyword.
In addition, we organized trend topics based on authors’ keywords (Supplementary figure 6) to visualize how research trends had changed over the 20 years, with the size of the circles representing the frequency of the corresponding topics. As we can see, ”type-2 inflammation”, ”patient-reported outcomes”, ”nasal polyp score,” and ”biologics” were the latest trend topics.
Beyond that, we added the objective keywords plus analysis (Supplementary figure 7) to provide a more comprehensive analysis of keywords. The keywords plus can exclude authors’ subjective factors and reflect the main elements discussed in the publication. As shown in Supplementary figure 7, ”asthma”, ”expression”, ”inflammation”, and ”endoscopic sinus surgery” were the most discussed keywords in publications during the 20 years. The trending topics analysis was built based on the keywords plus (Figure 4B). The most recent trending topics were ”biologics”, ”type-2 inflammation”, ” hypereosinophilic”, ”mepolizumab”, and others (more information can be found in the table.) Combining the results above, ”biologics” and ”type-2 inflammation” were mentioned many times, and the importance of these topics deserves attention.
We combined affiliations, authors, and keywords plus to draw a Sankey diagram (Supplementary figure 8). The Sankey diagram can show the relationship between these three topics. The lines’ thickness represents the connection between the two; for example, Bachert B. mainly worked with Ghent University, Ghent University Hospital, and Karolinska Institute. Northwestern University had more studies on nasal polyps.