Global research trends on the relationship between RNA m⁵C modification and cancer progression: a comprehensive visualization and bibliometric analysis (1900−2024)

The m⁵C modification is one of the widely occurring modifications on RNA. In recent years, m⁵C modification on RNA has increasingly become a focal point in cancer research. Nevertheless, investigating scientific and quantitative research on the publication trends in this field can help us understand the research background and emerging hotspots, providing insights for targeting RNA m⁵C sites in cancer therapy. Co-occurrence analyses and visualizations, including authorship, keywords, genes and diseases, were performed using VOSviewer. CiteSpace was used to identify bursting institutions, keywords and references. R packages, including clusterProfiler, enrichplot and ggplot2, were used to visualize the enrichment results of GO and KEGG. The top contributors to this field were the United States and China, and the journals with the most publications were Frontiers in Genetics and Frontiers in Oncology. The most common keyword was “m⁵C methylation” and the most related genes were “NSUN2”, “AKT1” and “METTL3”. This study conducted a bibliometric analysis covering the development process of RNA m⁵C modification in cancer progression, identifying the countries, institutions, authors, journals, and publications in this field. Additionally, we found that the genes most closely associated with m⁵C are likely to play a significant role in the process of viral oncogenesis. These findings provide a comprehensive overview of RNA m⁵C modification during cancer research and insights into RNA m⁵C-tageted cancer therapy.