A bibliometric analysis of COVID-19 publications concerning "mechanism" as a research topic in allergy journals during 2020-2021

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.