Research trends on stereotactic radiosurgery in brain metastases: a bibliometric analysis from 2013 to 2023

Brain metastases (BM) are the most common type of intracranial tumor and the leading cause of mortality in patients with systemic cancer. In recent years, stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) has been widely used in the radiotherapy of BM due to its advantages of high positional accuracy and highly conformal dose distributions. However, this area lacks a bibliometric analysis. This study aims to provide an overview of recent trends and key topics related to SRS for BM treatment over the past decade and to anticipate future directions through bibliometric methods. We conducted a search in the Web of Science for publications on SRS in BM treatment from 2013 to 2023. VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and the R package "bibliometrix" were utilized to perform a bibliometric and visual analysis of online publications in this field, focusing on countries/regions, institutions, authors, journals, and keywords. A total of 2,085 articles were identified in this study, with a steady increase observed in annual publications. The United States (USA) was the most productive country and the core of international cooperation; Mayo Clinic was the institution with the most publications and citations; Journal of Neuro-Oncology published the most papers; the most published author was Sahgal A, and Brown PD was the most co-cited author. The latest high-frequency keywords were immunotherapy, survival, prognosis, recurrence, leptomeningeal metastases, and so on. Keyword cooccurrence was used for cluster analysis, resulting in 7 clusters that highlight the emerging frontiers of SRS in BM treatment. As medical imaging informatics technology continues to advance, research into SRS for BM treatment has become increasingly in-depth. The immunoadjuvant therapy, biological effective dose, and radionecrosis have emerged as hot topics in recent years. Future work is ongoing to develop and improve artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist in SRS treatment planning, thus benefiting more BM patients.