Abstract: Objective · To give a retrospective bibliometric analysis of documents about the breast cancer stem cell (BCSC) and reveal the hotspots and trends of global output. Methods · Articles about the research of BCSC between 2014 and 2019 were retrieved in PubMed and Scopus databases, and SciVal was used to evaluate the global scholarly output and identify the most active factors, such as publications, countries, institutions, and top journal percentile, from the indicators of Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), CiteScore (CS), keywords and topic prominence percentile. Research hotspots and trends were discussed in detail. Results · A total of 4 700 publications on the research of BCSC from 2014 to 2019 were retrieved in this study with FWCI 1.73. The USA was the top country with a total of 1 742 publications and National Institutes of Health was the top institution both in total citation and FWCI. Non-coding RNA (ncRNA), mesenchymal stem cells, and immunotherapy were the most frequently used topics in BCSC. Conclusion · Researches on the correlation of BCSC and ncRNA, tumor microenvironment, and immunotherapy are the hotspots and trends in BCSC.

Key words: breast cancer stem cell, non-coding RNA, tumor microenvironment, immunotherapy, hotspot analysis