Abstract:Background and Aims Pancreatic cancer is one of the digestive system tumors with a high degree of malignancy. Due to its insidious onset, early symptoms are often not typical, and it has a strong invasive nature, therefore, the prognosis is poor. With the in-depth study of the molecular pathogenesis of pancreatic cancer, immunotherapy has become a new focus of pancreatic cancer treatment. Bibliometrics is a commonly used method to analyze the literature of a certain field, summarize the trend of the literature intuitively, and predict research hotspots. This article aims to provide direction for subsequent research by analyzing the current status, hotspots, and trends of immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer through bibliometrics and knowledge map visualization.Methods The relevant publications on pancreatic cancer immunotherapy published from the inception to May 2022 were extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection. A bibliometric visualization analysis of countries, institutions, authors, references, and keywords in the publications in this filed was performed using software such as CtieSpace and VOSviewer.Results A total of 2 230 English-language literature related to pancreatic cancer immunotherapy published between 2009 and 2022 were included, and the number of publications has been steadily increasing every year since 2016. These publications had 7 943 co-cited references and 7 365 authors from 884 institutions in 75 countries/regions. The country with the most publications was the United States (n=964), followed by China (n=552). The institution with the most publications was Johns Hopkins University in the United States (n=67) and the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas (n=65). The authors with the most publications were Elizabeth M Jaffee (n=41) and Lei Zheng (n=31), both from Johns Hopkins University in the United States. The most cited publication was "Genomic analyses identify molecular subtypes of pancreatic cancer" (n=161), and the timeline of co-cited references showed that clustering "tumor microenvironment" has been a hot topic since 2016. The keyword burst detection revealed the development of the field of pancreatic cancer immunotherapy, with "vaccine" being the initial hot topic, and the focus shifting to "ipilimumab" "checkpoint blockade" "epithelial-mesenchymal transition" "stellate cells" "macrophages" "mismatch repair deficiency" and "tumor microenvironment" in recent years.Conclusion Research related to immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer is showing a sustained upward trend and has become an important research direction for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. Currently, the United States is in an absolute leading position in this research field. Studies have shown that the unique tumor microenvironment may be the main reason for the high malignancy and insensitivity to radiation and chemotherapy of pancreatic cancer, and the underlying mechanisms of the pathogenesis of pancreatic cancer tumor microenvironment are the current focus of research. In addition, research focusing on "epithelial-mesenchymal transition" and "immune checkpoint inhibition" is more common. Existing research indicates that single treatment options have limited effectiveness for the treatment of pancreatic cancer, and immune combination therapy or chemotherapy combined with immunotherapy can further improve the clinical efficacy of pancreatic cancer, which is the trend of future clinical research.