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.