Global hotspots and trends of stereotactic radiotherapy for pancreatic cancer: a bibliometric analysis and visual analysis from 2015 to 2025

Background: Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a highly aggressive malignant tumor with extremely poor prognosis. Most patients are locally advanced or unresectable at the time of diagnosis. Stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) has received extensive attention in this field in recent years due to its advantages of high precision, short course of treatment and low toxicity. However, there is a lack of summary of recent research trends and hotspots. This study aimed to characterize the current status, hotspots, and future directions of this field.

Methods: Based on the core collection of Web of Science, we searched relevant publications on SBRT in PC treatment published from January 2015 to December 2025. CiteSpace and VOSviewerwere used for bibliometric analysis and visual analysis of publications in this field, covering annual publication trends, countries/regions, institutions, highly cited literatures, authors, journals and keywords.

Results: WoSCC included 296 articles from 28 countries. Since 2015, the number of publications on SBRT for PC has increased annually. The United States (USA) was the most productive country, Johns Hopkins University the leading institution, Cancers and Frontiers in Oncology tied as the most prolific journal, and Herman JM the most productive and most frequently cited author. Besides topic-relevant High frequency and high betweenness centrality (BC) keywords, other notable keywords included “overall survival”, “dose escalation”, “MR image guided radiotherapy”, and “adaptive radiotherapy”.

Conclusions: SBRT has been increasingly studied in PC, focusing on dose and technical optimization. The future development direction will focus on the development and improvement of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, MR-guided adaptive radiotherapy, and combined immune strategy to further improve the survival and quality of life of PC patients.