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. 2022 Jan 22;19(3):1220.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph19031220.

Research on Health Disparities Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Bibliometric Analysis

Keng Yang  1   2 , Hanying Qi  3   4
Affiliations

Research on Health Disparities Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Bibliometric Analysis

Keng Yang et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

With the outbreak of the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the issue of increasing health disparities has received a great deal of attention from scholars and organizations. This study analyzes 2282 papers on COVID-19-related health disparities that have been retrieved from the WOS database, with 58,413 references. Using bibliometric analysis and knowledge mapping visualizations, the paper focuses on the academic structure and research trends by examining the research distribution of countries, journals and authors, keywords, highly cited articles, and reference co-citation. The results show that the United States has contributed the most, and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has published the largest number of papers on this topic. As for the core authors, Michael Marmot is the most productive. Issues such as racial health, mental health, and digital health disparities have been the trending topics of the COVID-19-related health disparities. The research directions include the features, factors, and interventions of health disparities under the influence of COVID-19. As such, this study provides literature support and suggestions to investigate COVID-19-related health disparities. The findings of the paper also remind public health regulators to consider factors of health disparities when developing long-term public health regulatory policies related to the pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; bibliometric analysis; health disparities; health inequalities; public health emergency; public health regulatory policy.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A subject matter overlay of publications on COVID-19-related health disparities. Note (s): wavelike curves represent citation links. They are colored by their source clusters. The dots in the clusters represent journals. The color of a dot denotes its Blondel cluster membership. The Blondel cluster membership is obtained by the Blondel algorithm [29].
Figure 2
Figure 2
The co-operation networks of countries or regions. Note(s): Colors represent clusters, the thickness of linked lines represents intensity of co-operation, and node sizes represent the number of publications.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Country or region distribution of each research category.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Co-citation network of journals (five clusters of 439 items). Note(s): Colors represent clusters, the thickness of linked lines represents the intensity of co-citation, and node sizes represent citation frequency.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Co-authorship network. Note(s): Colors represent clusters, linked lines represent co-operative relationships, and node sizes represent publication numbers.
Figure 6
Figure 6
The authors co-citation network of cited references. Note(s): Color represents clusters, linked lines represent co-citation relationships, and node sizes represent citation frequencies.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Keyword co-occurrence network. Note(s): The minimum number of occurrences of a keyword is 5. There are 384 keywords that meet the threshold.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Overlay map of keyword co-occurrence network. Note(s): Color refers to the average publication year of keywords.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Co-citation network of cited references.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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