Research on Schistosomiasis in the Era of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Bibliometric Analysis

The objectives of this work are to check whether the COVID-19 pandemic affected the research on schistosomiasis, to provide an insight into the most productive countries and journals and the most cited publications, and to analyse any association between the total publications of countries and a set of socio-economic and demographic factors. Based on PRISMA methodology, we used the Scopus database to search for articles published between 1 January 2020 and 26 March 2022. VOSviewer was used to generate the co-authorship and the co-occurrence networks, and Spearman's rank correlation was applied to study associations. A total of 1988 articles were included in the study. Although we found that the year-wise distribution of publications suggests no impact on schistosomiasis research, many resources have been devoted to research on COVID-19, and the Global Schistosomiasis Alliance revealed the main activities for eradication of schistosomiasis had been affected. The most productive country was the United States of America. The articles were mainly published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The most prolific funding institution was the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The total publications per country were significantly correlated with population, GERD, and researchers per million inhabitants, but not with GDP per capita and MPM.

Automated summary

This study aims to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on schistosomiasis research, identify the most productive countries and journals, and analyze the association between total publications and socio-economic and demographic factors. The findings suggest that while there was no direct impact on schistosomiasis research, resources have been redirected to COVID-19 research, affecting the activities for the eradication of schistosomiasis.