SYSTEMIC SCLEROSIS at the TIME of COVID-19 PANDEMIC: A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY

ABSTRACT

Background: The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) affects different organs and systems of the human organism. However, the main target remains the respiratory system and lungs in particular. Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is one of the systemic autoimmune diseases that can cause severe lung impairment. Considering the existence of common points of influence on the human organism, the overlapping of these two pathologies can signifcantly increase the negative impact on the patient's health. Objectives: This study was aimed to analyze the common features of articles covering the link between COVID-19 and systemic sclerosis. Methods: We retrieved the literature items in the Scientific bibliometric database Scopus conducting our search on the 26th of January. We didn't set any time limits and did use the following keywords 'systemic sclerosis' OR 'scleroderma' AND 'Covid-19' OR 'COVID-19' OR 'coronavirus'. The exclusion criteria were absence of an , literature items in form of conference papers, and articles dedicated to the rheumatological pathology in general with scarce mention of SSc. All selected papers were analyzed in view of the following characteristics documents' type, authorship, journal, citations score, the origin of an article, language, and keywords. For data visualization, we have used software tool VOSviewer version 1.6.15 which make possible to build authors' and keywords' network (Figure 1 A and B) (the minimum keywords' threshold was 3 and the minimum author occurrence was 5). Results: In the result of our comprehensive literature search only 206 items were obtained. After screening of title, and keywords we omitted 166 articles as they met our exclusion criteria and were irrelevant for our study. The most (87.5%) of remained 40 articles were open access publications, which improves the articles' visibility and simplifes data sharing. The top journals covering this topic were Annals Of The Rheumatic Diseases (n=7), Journal of Psychosomatic Research (n=4), Journal Of Scleroderma And Related Disorders (n=4), Clinical Rheumatology (n=3), Lancet Rheumatology (n=3) and Scandinavian Journal Of Rheumatology (n=3). The post productive authors originated from Italy (n of articles = 20);other countries with highest number of publications were UK-10;USA-7;France-7 and Netherlands-6). The majority of papers were written in English and just one was in Chinese. The most prevalent research type among analyzed articles was Letter (47.5%), about a third of the articles were designed as Original Articles (35%), 7.5% were Notes, the number of Reviews and Editorials was 5% for each type. Based on the citations score, the most relevant article was dedicated to COVID-19 course in patients with SSc associated interstitial lung disease (SSC-ILD) using tocilizumab. The second highly cited paper highlighted a disease course of COVID-19 pneumonia in SSc patients treated with rituxi-mab and the third actively cited article was World Scleroderma Foundation preliminary advice for patient management. It should also be noted that a lot of articles (n=7, 17.5%) were dedicated to the emotional wellbeing of SSc patients in time of COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusion: Based on our literature analysis, it is the frst attempt to overview comprehensively the papers focusing on SSc and COVID-19 overlap. The biblio-metric studies offer an essential opportunity to emphasize the main features and trends in the particular topic and could be used by scientists as a guidance for forthcoming research.