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Review
. 2022;75(1):102-109.
doi: 10.5173/ceju.2021.291. Epub 2022 Jan 13.

The impact the COVID-19 pandemic on urology literature: a bibliometric analysis

Fabio Crocerossa  1   2 , William Visser  1 , Umberto Carbonara  1   3 , Ugo Giovanni Falagario  4 , Savio Domenico Pandolfo  1   5 , Davide Loizzo  1   3 , Ciro Imbimbo  5 , Adam P Klausner  1 , Francesco Porpiglia  6 , Rocco Damiano  2 , Francesco Cantiello  2 , Riccardo Autorino  1
Affiliations
Review

The impact the COVID-19 pandemic on urology literature: a bibliometric analysis

Fabio Crocerossa et al. Cent European J Urol. 2022.

Abstract

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused wide-reaching change to many aspects of life on a worldwide scale. The impact of these changes on peer-reviewed research journals, including those dedicated to urology, is still unknown.

Material and methods: The Web of Science database was queried to retrieve all COVID-19 urological articles written in English language and published between January 1st, 2020 and December 10th, 2021. Only original and review articles were considered. A bibliometric analysis of the total number of papers, citations, institutions and publishing journals was performed. Non-COVID-19 publications were also retrieved to compare the duration of publication stages.

Results: A total of 428 COVID-19 articles and 14,874 non-COVID-19 articles were collected. Significant differences in the duration of all the publication stages were found between COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 articles (all p <0.001). The most productive countries were the USA (100 articles), Italy (59 articles) and the United Kingdom (55 articles). The published literature has focused on four topics: COVID-19 genitourinary manifestations, management of urological diseases during the pandemic, repercussions on quality of life and impact on healthcare providers.

Conclusions: A significant reduction in peer review time for COVID-19 articles might raise concerns regarding the quality of peer review itself. USA, Italy and UK published the highest number of COVID-19 related articles. Restrictive measures taken by governments to reduce the spread of infection had a strong impact on mental stress and anxiety of patients and healthcare professionals. A coerced deferral of diagnosis and treatment of emergencies and uro-oncological cases represented the most challenging task from a clinical standpoint.

Keywords: COVID-19; bibliometric analysis; coronavirus; trends; urology.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Most globally cited COVID-19-related articles published by urological journals in 2020–2021.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The top 10 institutions that published most of COVID-19 related articles.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Country collaboration map.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Thematic Map. Keywords were grouped according to the frequency of co-occurrence; for each cluster, the most used keywords were highlighted in a larger font.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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