Top Ten Journals Publishing on COVID-19: A Scientometric Analysis

Trends in research on COVID-19 have been increased from its outbreak onwards. As a research field for describing knowledge status and research patterns in scientific fields, scientometrics uses quantification for evaluating the scientific production made by an author, institute, journal, country, region, etc.

This study aimed at identifying and visualizing the scientometricindicators of top ten highly productive journals publishing documents on topics related to COVID-19.

on April 4, 2021, using 36 COVID-19 keywords derived from MeSH retrieved all relevant global publications indexed in Scopus. Then, all studies were limited to top 10 highly productive journals in this field. An Exploratory and descriptive analysis of bibliographic data (number of publication/citations, journals, highly cited documents, highly cited/productive authors/countries, co-occurrence map of keywords, and co-citation map of sources) by using Microsoft Excel and VOS-viewer software packages were performed..

The top ranked journals in publication numbers belonged to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (N=1304, 16.2%), Plos One (N=1158, 14.4%)and BMJ (997, 12.4%), respectively. The Lancet (N=69983), JAMA (N=42553) and the Journal of Medical Virology (19089) ranked first to third as to received citation numbers, respectively. Mahase, E (N=180, 2.23%),Lacobucci, G (N=126, 1.56%) and Rimmer, A (N=82, 1.01%) were ranked first to third as highly-productive authors, respectively. However, the highest-ranked authors in their citations/document indicator were Cheng, Z (3691), Gu, X (2736.25) and Xia, J (2269.66), respectively. First to third ranked countries in receiving citations were China (94776), United States (51621) and United Kingdom (32339), respectively. Out of top 10 contributing countries in producing documents,United States (1976; 24.5%), UnitedKingdom (1372; 17%) and China (894; 11.1%) ranked first to third, respectively. Keywords co-occurrence and clustering showed that clinical manifestation and dissemination of the disease as well as its epidemiology have been heavily considered.

This study offers important quantitative information on journals working on the disease. Identifying most productive journals can help potential researchers collaborate with researchers from pioneering journals and contribute to top journals for making influential works on COVID-19 and consequent knowledge on the control and treatment of the disease.