Trends in Research about COVID-19 Vaccine Documented through Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis

Abstract

Due to COVID-19, people’s lives have changed greatly. In accordance with former experience, an efficacious vaccine is the most effective way to curb the pandemic; thus, many researchers have published related publications in the short term. Hence, this study aims at using bibliometric analysis and visualization to document research trends regarding COVID-19 vaccines, and offer some directions and suggestions for future research. Initially, all eligible publications were downloaded from Web of Science on 1 January 2022. Subsequently, some publications published before December 2019 were removed since COVID-19 did not occur before that date. Finally, Microsoft Excel is used for bibliometric analysis to analyze publication date, author, affiliation, country, publication title, publisher, research area, document type, and language, and visualized software (VOSviewer) is used to visualize author, affiliation, country, and keywords. After analyzing a total of 17,392 publications, the results show that the overall research trend was upward. Moreover, the prominent authors, institutions, and countries inclined towards regional cooperation instead of international cooperation. Furthermore, the most popular research areas were immunology and medicine (general and internal). Ultimately, COVID-19, vaccine, and SARS-CoV-2 were the top 3 keywords. In conclusion, this study shows the approximate research trend for COVID-19 vaccine during the completely first two years of the pandemic. The research focuses moved from safety, effectiveness, and immunology at the early stage to the optimal allocation strategies for COVID-19 vaccine, and eventually to public attitudes and acceptance towards COVID-19 vaccination.

Development trends and knowledge framework in the application of magnetic resonance imaging in prostate cancer: a bibliometric analysis from 1984 to 2022

“…The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) of the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database was chosen as the data source. It is the most frequently used and acceptable database for researchers in a variety of fields ( 16 ).…”

Current hotspot and study trend of innate immunity in COVID-19: a bibliometric analysis from 2020 to 2022

“…Bibliometric analysis offered an intuitive and effective foundation for integrating information, reflected interconnections between them, and predicted the development of cutting-edge advances in the area based on publications in this field ( 17 , 18 ). Recently, bibliometric analysis was widely adopted by scholars in neurology ( 19 ), vaccination ( 20 ), and otorhinolaryngology ( 21 ) related to COVID-19, especially the bibliometric analysis based on VOSviewer and CiteSpace software ( 22 , 23 ). However, bibliometric analysis of innate immunity in COVID-19 remains lacking.…”

High-Cited Papers in Global COVID-19 Vaccine Research

“…A few bibliometric studies have been published on assessment of global COVID-19 vaccines literature, which make the quantitative and qualitative assessment by way of analyzing various features of research output and citations. [7][8][9][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] With the rapid growth COVID-19 vaccines literature, it was difficult to go through such large number of publications appearing in various databases. It is observed that there has been a non-availability of any bibliometric study on HCPs papers on COVID-19 vaccine and any not study providing a quick, comprehensive synthesis of relevant information on the related scientific orientations, gaps, collaborations, themes, or dynamisms on COVID-19 vaccines.…”