ABSTRACT
Background: Bibliometric analysis has gained increasing interest as an efficient method to visualize COVID-19 research trends and patterns. This analysis may help to describe the profile of scientific contribution of allergy and clinical immunology specialists in the current COVID-19 pandemic. One of the arguments to support the leading role of allergists and clinical immunologists in the COVID-19 pandemic control is their expertise on disease mechanisms. We hypothesized that this role could also have an impact in the COVID-19 literature. Therefore, our objective was to compare the proportion of COVID-19 related publications dealing with the "mechanism" research topic between allergy and non-allergy journals. Method(s): This study involves a large-scale bibliometric analysis of more than 205,000 COVID-19 publications. This evaluation is embedded into the Covid Content Curation Project (0011-3638- 2020- 000001, Health Department of Navarra Government, Spain), an ongoing research to design an artificial intelligence platform for grading the relevance for decision making of COVID-19 scientific publications. We used web scraping functionalities of the Covid Content Curation platform to obtain a complete and up-to- date list of COVID-19 publications. Exclusion criteria were duplicate publications, publications from the preprint servers, publications published before March 1, 2020 or after December 31, 2021, or with any missing date data. Result(s): After exclusion criteria, 205,982 COVID-19 publications were available for analysis. The cumulative total of COVID-19 publications in allergy journals was 923 (4.48;95% CI: 4.20 to 4.78). The number of COVID-19 publications dealing with "mechanism" as a research topic was 13.22 (95% CI: 10.03 to 16.41) percentage points greater among allergy journals than non-allergy journals (p < 0.001) (Figure 1). Conclusion(s): These results show that the "mechanism" research topic is of greater prevalence in COVID-19 publications of allergy journals than non-allergy journals, and support the hypothesis that the prominent role of allergists and clinical immunologists in the COVID-19 pandemic control, based on their expertise on disease mechanisms, may also have an impact in the COVID-19 literature.