Global trends of COVID-19 research in cancer: A scientometric study.

Abstract

e13549 Background: The scientific literature experienced an unprecedented growth in archived pre-prints and peer-reviewed COVID-19 related publications with regional variations making the task of synthesizing the information burdensome. This study aims to characterize global patterns and domains of COVID-19 research in cancer. Methods: We used the NIH COVID-19 portfolio and Web of Science (WOS) curated databases to extract abstracts using standard search terms for COVID-19 and cancer between Nov 1 2019 and Dec 31 2020. A total of 21,325 publications matched the study search criteria (NIH: 18,029 records; WOS: 3512 records; 204 records overlapped). We performed a descriptive analysis to calculate country citations and intercountry collaboration networks. The Jaccard similarity index was utilized to identify the most frequently co-occurring terms. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used for classifying publications into corresponding research topics. Results: The most productive period was May 2020 with 3,181 published articles, mean citation rate per paper was highest in Jan 2020 (1,620.5) followed by Feb 2020 (236.7), highest mean use rate in the last 12 months was March 2020. Top productive countries are classified as High and Upper Middle-income countries, 17% of research contributed by USA, 12% by China PR, and 11.4% by Italy. Linkage between top 30 productive countries show USA, Italy, and England with the highest inter-country co-ordination. Analysis of keywords co-occurring at least 5 times resulted in 12 major clusters including: 1) cancer treatment and mortality; 2) inflammation and immunology; 3) chronic diseases and co-morbidities; and 4) mental health and social psychology. Ranked topics with the highest volume of publications include 1) effect of COVID-19 on treatment outcomes; 2) individual risk factors of COVID-19 severity and mortality, and 3) novel treatment options relevant to cancer patients [Table]. Growth of articles peaked between Mar and Apr 2020 with a steady decline across all topics in Sept 2020. Conclusions: Global cancer –related research productivity peaked following the declaration of the pandemic and first wave in Mar- Apr 2020. Systematic synthesis of a large volume of COVID-19 literature revealed the global research landscape highlighting focus on the study of outcomes in cancer patients.[Table: see text]