Response to article by Ruochen Bao et al., “Bibliometric analysis of immunotherapy for bladder cancer: A correspondence”

To the Editor

Recently we have been reading an excellent work by Ruochen et al. entitled “Bibliometric analysis of immunotherapy for bladder cancer: A correspondence.”¹ The article is a short communication of a article by lv et al. called “Knowledge-map analysis of bladder cancer immunotherapy,”² Based on the full work of lv et al., Ruochen et al. improved the search strategy and simplified and accurate the included literature. At the same time, they longitudinally display the research results of the relevant authors from 2000 to 2022 on the basis of LV et al., and made some new discoveries. Ruochen et al. put forward some excellent suggestions, such as selecting the appropriate subdatabase when searching and changing the subject search to “TI,” “AB,” “AK” as the screening criteria. We strongly agree with that. Nevertheless, we still found a small flaw in this short communication.

Ruochen et al. mentioned that after adopting the optimized search method, a total of 3221 relevant articles were retrieved from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2022. After excluding non-English articles and non-articles, 2079 articles were included in the study after data filtering. However, the number of “Documents” shown in Figure 1a they provided (2057) does not match the above. We suspect that this error was caused by the fact that Ruochen et al. did not tick “Show Final Publication Year” in the “publication years” section of the “refine results” column when searching for documents in the Web of Science (WOS) before limiting the time span. Since some articles were “Early Access,” it was easy to incorporate literature that did not fall within the time limit into the results during the search process. Then the publication time shown in the “bibliometrix” R package is the final publication year, so the total number of articles obtained in further screening will be less than those retrieved in WOS. Therefore, it is very important to strictly limit the scope of search in the field of bibliometric analysis.

Finally, we congratulate Ruochen et al. for their excellent work. Their research has been very thorough and well developed. We believe that the summary of Ruochen and his colleagues will help us to design more rigorous search strategies in bibliometrics research so as to deeply understand the hot spots and development trends in a certain research field. However, more rigorous data retrieval and conditional restrictions are needed to make the article more scientific.

Funding Statement

The work was supported by National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine National Clinical Excellent Talents Training Program [No.2022–239].

Declaration of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Author contributions

Ziqi Zhao found the error, conceived the original idea and wrote the manuscript; Yizhuo Jiang was involved in drafting of the paper. Kun Xu and Xisheng Xu was revising it critically for intellectual content. Yuliang Liu was involved in concep-tion and design of the paper.