What We Know about Top 1000 Highly-Cited COVID-19 Papers: A Bibliometric Analysis

Background: Highly cited papers are considered publications with a great impact on a scientific community and have been deeply investigated in different fields. Aim: This study aimed at analyzing and visualizing the top 1000 highly cited papers on COVID-19. Methods: As a bibliometric study, this study was conducted by retrieving 1000 highly-cited papers on COVID-19 published during 2019-2021 from Scopus. The search strategy was to obtain 35 related keywords/terms on the COVID-19 as the main term from MeSH and searching them in the fields of paper titles, abstracts, and keywords. Bibliometric techniques such as co-citation analysis, co-authorship analysis and word co-occurrence analysis were used for the study. Data visualization was done by applying the VOSviewer software package and GunnMap. Results: China, the United States of America (USA), and the United Kingdom (UK) with publishing 418, 353, and 149, mostly cited papers were ranked first-to-third, respectively. The top contributing research institutes were from China and the USA. The top three most productive research institutions were Huazhong University of Science and Technology (N=83), Tongji Medical College (N=76), and Wuhan University (N=64), respectively. The New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and JAMA ranked first to third in publishing these papers, respectively. Collaborating countries were mainly of European origin. Research institutes from China, the USA, and the UK had higher collaboration. Keyword clustering showed that the clinical features and laboratory descriptions, risk factors, pathogenic and immunological aspects as well as the managerial aspects and urgent preparation of the disease were topics with high concern and concentration. Conclusion: This study is the first bibliometric study on the top 1000 highly cited papers on COVID-19 and can be beneficial to researchers in identifying important topics, active producing agents and existing gaps in the literature on the disease. It can be conceived as a reference for COVID-19 researchers and a guide for conducting other bibliometric studies on COVID-19 scientific investigation.