Decades of research supporting malaria control and elimination in China: a bibliometric analysis of academic articles published in Chinese from 1980 to 2019

Abstract

Background: China has accumulated a lot of experience on malaria control and elimination in the past few decades. Many research papers have been published in Chinese journals. This study intends to obtain the development path and experience of malaria control and elimination in China by quantitatively analyzing these local journals based on the bibliometric analysis.Methods: A long-term, multi-stage bibliometric analysis was implemented. Research articles published in Chinese journals from 1980 to 2019 were retrieved from Wanfang database and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). Year of publication, journal name and keywords were extracted by the Bibliographic Items Co-occurrence Matrix Builder (BICOMB). We defined the K/A ratio (the percentage of a keyword frequency in the number of articles within a certain period) as an indicator for measuring the popularity of a keyword in different decades. And we used the software VOSviewer to make keyword co-occurrence network maps.Results: A total of 16,290 articles were included. The overall trend of articles continues to rise. However, the articles published in the past three years had continued to decline. There are two kinds of trends of the keyword frequency between different decades. The K/A ratio of keywords such as ‘Plasmodium falciparum’ continued to decline (17.05% in 1980s, 13.04% in 1990s, 9.86% in 2000s, 5.28% in 2010s), but ‘imported case’ and ‘surveillance’ continued to rise. Drug resistance always was a concern. The keyword co-occurrence network maps showed that the themes in malaria research were becoming more diverse, and the degree of multidisciplinary cooperation was gradually deepening.Conclusion: This bibliometric analysis reveals the trends in malaria research in China over the past 40 years. The results suggest the high attention on the investigation, multidisciplinary participation and drug resistance for researchers and policymakers in malaria-epidemic areas. And the results also provided domestic experts with qualitative evidence for the summary of China's experience on malaria control and elimination.