Research trends in COVID-19 vaccine: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Background: In the last two decades the world has experienced many outbreaks of infectious diseases including the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. COVID-19 was first reported in China and spread to more than 200 countries and territories. At present, there are no available treatment and vaccines for COVID-19. This study aimed to evaluate the global research trends in COVID-19 vaccine.Methods: On January 12, 2020, a comprehensive search of documents on COVID-19 was conducted in the Web of Science Core Collection database. HistCite^TM and VOSviewer softwares are used for citations and visualization mapping.Results: A total of 916 documents authored by 4,392 authors and published in 376 journals were included in the final analysis. Majority of the retrieved documents consisted of articles (n = 372, 40.6%). The most prolific authors were Dhama K (n = 10, 1.1%) and Hotez PJ (n = 10, 1.1%). The most active institution was the University of Oxford (n = 24, 2.6%). The leading journal in COVID-19 vaccine was Human Vaccine & Immunotherapeutics (n = 43, 4.7%). The most frequently used keywords were COVID (n = 597, 65.2%), and vaccine (n = 521, 56.9%). Furthermore, visualization mapping shows that COVID-19 was the most co-occurrence author keyword. The United States of America (USA) was the most productive country, 352 (38.4%).Conclusions: This is the first bibliometric study that provides detailed information about published literature on the COVID-19 vaccine. Majority of the publications were published in developed countries. The findings may useful for researchers and policymakers.

Keywords: COVID-19; HistCiteTM; VOSviewer; bibliometric analysis; vaccine.

Figure 1.

Flow chart of included publications on COVID-19 vaccine

Figure 2.

Co-authorship country visualization network map. Only five clusters are formed; red color indicates Cluster 1 (11 countries: Austria, Belgium, England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherland, Scotland, Sweden, and Turkey); green color indicates Cluster 2 (10 countries: Chile, Denmark, Greece, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, and Thailand); blue color indicates Cluster 3 (9 countries: Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia); yellow color indicates Cluster 3 (8 countries: Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, and Taiwan); purple color indicates cluster 5 (6 countries: Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Norway, China, and USA)

Figure 3.

Visualization network map of author keywords co-occurrence. There are nine Clusters are formed weights based on occurrences. Red color represents Cluster 1 (14 words), green color represents Cluster 2 (11 words), blue color represents Cluster 3 (9 words), yellow color represents Cluster 4 (7 words), purple color represents Cluster 5 (6 words), light-blue represents Cluster 6 (5 words), orange color represents Cluster 7 (5 words), black color represents Cluster 8 (3 words), and pink color represents Cluster 9 (1 word)

Figure 4.

Visualization mapping of co-citation cited sources. There are five clusters formed; red color indicates cluster 1 (90 sources), green color indicates cluster 2 (57 sources), blue color indicates cluster 3 (31 sources), yellow color represents cluster 4 (21 sources), and purple color represents cluster 5 (18 sources)