
==== Front
Int J Surg
Int J Surg
JS9
International Journal of Surgery (London, England)
1743-9191
1743-9159
Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Hagerstown, MD

38814320
IJS-D-24-02010
10.1097/JS9.0000000000001729
00113
3
Correspondence
A commentary on ‘Global trends in colorectal cancer and metabolic syndrome research: a bibliometric and visualization analysis’
Niu Kaiyi MD kyniu515@163.com

Shi Yanlong MD vvshiyanlong@qq.com

Wang Yizhu MD 18810825818@163.com

Zhang Yewei PhD zhangyewei@njmu.edu.cn
*
General Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, People’s Republic of China
* Corresponding author. Address: No. 121, Gulou, Nanjing 210003, Jiangsu Province, People’s Republic of China. Te.: +86 15555190939. E-mail: zhangyewei@njmu.edu.cn (Y. Zhang).
9 2024
29 5 2024
110 9 59695970
13 5 2024
19 5 2024
Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0 (CCBY-NC-ND), where it is permissible to download and share the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially without permission from the journal. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

OPEN-ACCESSTRUE
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pmc Dear Editor,

Recently, the International Journal of Surgery published an article written by Wu et al.1 entitled ‘Global trends in colorectal cancer and metabolic syndrome research: a bibliometric and visualization’, and we read it carefully with great interest. This article first provides a systematic and comprehensive analysis of colorectal cancer (CRC) and metabolic syndrome (MetS) related research through various bibliometric methods and demonstrates the current status and future research hotspots of CRC and MetS in detail. We sincerely appreciate the authors’ contribution to this field. Here, we would like to express some of our views that may help to enhance further research in this field.

Firstly, a comprehensive search formula is basic for bibliometric study and determines the quality of overall research. The authors used specific search formulas to reduce the omission of relevant literature and minimize bias. However, some abbreviations were ignored during searches, which can lead to inaccurate and incomplete search results. Moreover, using the wildcard character ‘*’ could simplify the search formula and obtain accurate results since it represents any group of characters, including the null character. Besides, it may be inappropriate to use Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) in a single bibliometric analysis as it includes 10 different types and levels of databases, which may introduce bias and limit the scientificity of the analysis. Previous studies showed that SCIE may be the most appropriate database for bibliometric analysis, and if the condition allows, we recommend authors verify the related results using the SCIE database2. Furthermore, most scholars prefer Medical subject headings (MeSH) for bibliometric analysis since it contains a hierarchical structure and MeSH descriptors represent different semantic types3.

Secondly, in the section ‘Keyword co-occurrence and burst analysis’, the authors analyzed a total of 68 keywords and listed the top 20 keywords by frequency and centrality ranking. However, we notice that there exist many synonymous keywords in Table 2 and Table 11-Keywords in the Supplementary Information, such as colorectal cancer vs. colorectal neoplasm, and cigarette smoking vs. smoking. Unclear or synonymous keywords will not only cover up potentially valuable keywords and affect the accuracy of the results of keyword co-occurrence analysis but also make researchers feel confused about understanding the research frontier. Data scrubbing is the process of reexamining and verifying data to remove duplicate information, correct errors, and provide data consistency4. To obtain accurate keyword cluster analysis results, it is necessary to conduct data scrubbing that can avoid the confusion caused by different expressions of the same meaning.

Last but not least, we suggest that apart from the number of articles published already, some scientific metric measures like h-index or g-index should be included, which have a great advantage of evaluating a researcher by synthesizing both the quality and quantity of their publications5.

In sum, the authors have contributed significantly to the current status and research hotspots as well as future research trends in the field of CRC and MetS. We sincerely congratulate the authors for their achievements in this field. We also believe that our suggestions can help the authors to obtain more reliable and accurate results.

Ethical approval

Not applicable.

Consent

Not applicable.

Source of funding

Not applicable.

Author contribution

K.N. and Y.S.: searched literatures and wrote the manuscript; Y.W.: revised the manuscript. All authors approved the last version of the manuscript.

Conflicts of interest disclosure

There are no conflicts of interest.

Research registration unique identifying number (UIN)

Not applicable.

Guarantor

Yewei Zhang.

Data availability statement

Not applicable.

Provenance and peer review

Not applicable.

Acknowledgements

Not applicable.

Kaiyi Niu, Yanlong Shi, and Yizhu Wang contributed equally to this work.

Sponsorships or competing interests that may be relevant to content are disclosed at the end of this article.

Published online 29 May 2024
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References

1 Wu P-N Liu J-L Fang M-J . Global trends in colorectal cancer and metabolic syndrome research: a bibliometric and visualization analysis. Int J Surg 2024;18 [Epub ahead of print]. doi:10.1097/JS9.0000000000001342
2 He T Zou J Sun K . Global research status and frontiers on autophagy in hepatocellular carcinoma: a comprehensive bibliometric and visualized analysis. Int J Surg 2024;110 :2788–2802.38376850
3 Wilson M Sampson M Barrowman N . Bibliometric analysis of neurology articles published in general medicine journals. JAMA Netw Open 2021;4 :e215840.33856477
4 Sun G Dong D Dong Z . Drug repositioning: a bibliometric analysis. Front Pharmacol 2022;13 :974849.36225586
5 Del Giudice M . How well do bibliometric indicators correlate with scientific eminence? A comment on Simonton (2016). Perspect Psychol Sci 2020;15 :202–203.31721655
