Current Status and Emerging Trends of COVID-19-related Studies in Seven ‘Tropical Medicine’-entitled Journals

Abstract

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has created enormous medical and economic burdens on human society. However, the co-existence of COVID-19 and diseases in tropical regions is not taken seriously. To improve the understanding of the current status and trends on crosstalk of COVID-19 and tropical diseases, this paper provided an analysis, from a bibliometric perspective, of the COVID-19-related publications in ″Tropical Medicine″-entitled journals. Methods: We used Clarivate Analytics and VOSviewer to analyze 783 publications in seven ″ Tropical Medicine″-entitled journals. Document overview, basic bibliometric characteristics, citation performance, co-authorship, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-occurrence of keywords and terms were summarized in this article. Results: Document overview revealed that 76.12% of the related publications were published in open access mode, and basic bibliometric characteristics indicated that the year 2021 was the peak of the number of publications, the documents in the seven journals were unevenly distributed, and ″ article″ was the main publication type. The citation performance analysis elucidated that the documents of interest were frequently cited. The co-authorship analysis showed cooperation networks on the level of region, organization and author. General knowledge of COVID-19 was the overlap of co-citation and bibliographic coupling behavior. Finally, the co-occurrence of keywords and terms revealed the current and emerging hotspots. Conclusions: The main current research focuses in ″Tropical Medicine″-entitled journals are the clinical features of COVID-19 patients, and the emerging trends are the hesitancy in making vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and the circumstance where COVID-19 coexisted with tropical diseases. In summary, this bibliometric analysis of COVID-19-related studies in seven ″Tropical Medicine″-entitled journals highlights the current research focuses of this field to inspire future studies.