Letter to the Editor: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Cancer Research: A Systematic and Thematic Analysis of the Top 100 Cited Articles Indexed in Scopus Database

To the Editor:

I have read with great interest the recently published article entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Cancer Research: A Systematic and Thematic Analysis of the Top 100 Cited Articles Indexed in Scopus Database”. The authors aimed to identify and characterize the top 100 cited papers (articles and reviews) and to provide an overview of the conceptual framework and the thematic evolution of published literature on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) applications in cancer research indexed in the Scopus database. ¹

The current study has raised a few questions.

Q1: This study is about the AI and ML applications in cancer research. Although authors mentioned cancer as a keyword in the title and emphasized it throughout the paper, why did the authors not include the keyword “cancer” in the search keywords?

Q2: Authors used the Boolean search method and their search was limited to the title field. How did the authors retrieve the included paper in the top 100 most cited articles list. ² ? None of the keywords “Benign neoplasms* or malignancy* or malignant neoplasms* or neoplasia neoplasm* or neoplasms* or benign* or tumors*” is in the title.

Q3: Authors claimed that the search query was uniquely developed for the current study. What was the uniqueness of the study method?

I hope the authors will clarify these queries for the journal readers and researchers.