Covid-19 and Neuroscience Research: A Scientometric Assessment of India's Publications during 2020–21

Abstract

Neurological management in the present global Covid-19 crisis in India could be evaluated by undertaking assessment of current literature which may be useful to policy-makers and clinicians. Keeping this in view, the present study examines the Indian output on ‘Covid-19 and Neuroscience’ using bibliometric methods. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of Indian publications was performed for all the publications in Scopus database by using ‘Covid- 19’ and its synonyms keywords in ‘Keyword’ and ‘Title’ tags. The results obtained were further restricted to subject ‘Neurosciences’ under subject tag. The top 5 countries producing the highest number and share in global output were: United States 1,316 papers and 29.65% share), United Kingdom (597 papers and 13.45% share), Italy (552 papers and 12.44% share), China (382 papers and 8.61% share) and India (292 papers and 6.58% share). The organisations that produced the highest number of publications were NIHMANS-Bangalore, PGIMER-Chandigarh and AIIMS-New Delhi (30 papers each), K.G. Medical University-Lucknow (13 papers) and AIIMS-Rishikesh (11 papers). The journalsthat produced the highest number of publications were ‘Neurology India’ (29 papers), ‘Psychiatry Research’ (24 papers), ‘Journal Of Neurosciences In Rural Practice’ (16 papers), ‘Lancet Psychiatry’ (14 papers) and ‘Peerj’ (13 papers). The most commonly investigated topics in terms of frequency of appearances of keywords were ‘anxiety’ (36), ‘neurological disease’ (32), ‘depression’ (26), ‘mental disease’ (26), ‘mental health’ (26), ‘Gullain Barre syndrome’ (19), ‘neurosurgery’ (18), ‘Cerebro vascular accidents’ and ‘stroke’ (17 each), ‘Cykotine storm’ and ‘nervous system disease’ (15 each). The present study has the potential to provide a guide that can contribute to improvement in the literature.