Research visualization of post – COVID publications: Bibliometric analysis of PubMed database

Abstract

COVID-19 is a communicable disease that impacted worldwide in December 2019 and has taken more attention from researchers. Since then, a considerable amount of medical literature on COVID-19 has been generated. However, there is insufficient information on the bibliometric direction of research output associated with Post-COVID. Therefore, this study aims to explore the published research in the PubMed database on Post-COVID using bibliometric analysis techniques from 2020 to 2021. The search was conducted using “Post COVID"[All Fields]) from 2020/1/1 to 2021/12/31. Bibexcel version 2016, Microsoft Excel 2010, and VOSviewer version 1.6.18 were used to analyze different aspects such as source type, top journals, authorship pattern, most prolific authors, language productivity, contributing countries and major keywords. Out of 2,766 research publications, the majority (n=1,374, 49.67%) of research output has been published as journal articles. Cureus, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and Journal of Clinical Medicine were leading journals regarding publications count. Results indicated that the majority (n=2,650, 95.81%) of publications were written in English by single authors. The most prolific authors were Fernández-de-Las from King Juan Carlos University (Spain), Zhang Y from Biotherapy Center, Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University (China), and Hernández-Barrera V from the Department of Public Health, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain). The United States with 31.91% (n=165) and England with 21.66% (n=112) were two key contributors to the field. Humans, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and Pandemics were the primary MeSH keywords in the related literature on Post-COVID.