Mapping the landscape of gastric signet ring cell carcinoma: Overcoming hurdles and charting new paths for advancement.

[BACKGROUND] In recent years, the global prevalence of gastric cancer (GC) has witnessed a progressive decrease, accompanied by a step-growth in the incidence of gastric signet ring cell carcinoma (GSRCC). As precision medicine concepts progress, GSRCC, a distinct sub-type of GC, has drawn considerable attention from researchers. However, there still persist some controversies regarding the associated research findings.

[AIM] To summarize the current obstacles and potential future directions for research on GSRCC.

[METHODS] To begin with, all literature related to GSRCC published from January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2023 was subjected to bibliometric analysis in this article. Additionally, this paper analyzed the research data using CiteSpace, GraphPad Prism v8.0.2, and VOSviewer, which was obtained from the Web of Science Core Collection database. The analysis results were visually represented.

[RESULTS] This study provided a comprehensive overview of the statistical characteristics of the 995 English articles related to GSRCC, including cited references, authors, journals, countries, institutions, and keywords. The popular keywords and clusters contain "prognosis", "survival", "expression", "histology", and "chemotherapy".

[CONCLUSION] The prognosis, precise definition and classification, as well as chemoresistance of GSRCC, continue to be crucial areas of ongoing research, whose directions are closely tied to advancements in molecular biology research on GSRCC.