Current status and trends of immune-related adverse events in lung cancer treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors: a bibliometric analysis of the past decade (2016-2025).

Abstract / Summary

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are widely used in lung cancer treatment; however, immune-related adverse events (irAEs) remain an important safety-related research topic. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive bibliometric analyses specifically addressing irAEs in lung cancer. This study utilized the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) and PubMed databases to retrieve literature on irAEs associated with ICIs in lung cancer from 2016 to 2025. Among the 1, 792 eligible records from WoSCC, bibliometric and visualization analyses were conducted using tools such as Bibliometrix and CiteSpace (v7.0). Meanwhile, PubMed records classified as clinical studies were used only for supplementary descriptive clinical-topic mapping, focusing on study types, disease settings, intervention regimens, and irAE-related topic categories. The results indicate that the annual publication volume in this field showed a continuous upward trend from 2016 to 2025, progressing through three distinct phases: the initial phase (2016-2019), the rapid increase phase (2020-2022), and the stable development phase (2023-2025);China ranked first globally with 626 publications, while the United States showed the highest betweenness betweenness centrality in the international collaboration network, suggesting a relatively strong bridging position; however, China's high publication output was not accompanied by a similarly high network betweenness centrality; co-citation analysis identified two major groups of frequently co-cited references: landmark randomized trials of ICIs in lung cancer and guidelines or reviews on irAE management; Research hotspots exhibit a four-stage migration pattern: "originating from pan-tumor safety exploration in melanoma-focusing on lung cancer-specific high-risk irAEs-extending to efficacy-safety association analyses-and expanding to long-term prognosis in recurrent populations." Keyword burst analysis suggested increasing recent attention to recurrent disease, progression-free survival, and selected safety-related topics. The PubMed-based supplementary mapping further showed that the included clinical studies mainly involved combination immunotherapy, pulmonary toxicity, perioperative treatment settings, special populations, biomarker-related analyses, and irAE intervention-related topics. This bibliometric analysis describes the publication landscape, collaboration patterns, co-citation structure, and keyword evolution of ICI-related irAE research in lung cancer. The findings may help researchers identify major topic distributions and areas requiring further investigation, particularly organ-specific high-risk irAEs, biomarker-related studies, and safety-focused research in underrepresented populations.

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