POS1172 COVID-19 ACROSS RHEUMATOLOGY: A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY

Abstract

Background:The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak spread rapidly among the whole world, becoming the greatest pandemic for the decades. It triggered the enormous challenges for the global health system, forcing doctors and patients to adapt to new realities and the field of rheumatology was not an exclusion.Objectives:The aim of this study was to analyze articles covering interconnection between COVID-19 and rheumatic diseases; to investigate the common features of papers in this category and indicate the most influential among them; to determine which rheumatic nosologies were most represented.Methods:For retrieving of literature data, we applied the bibliometric database Scopus and conducted our search on 12th of January using following keywords: “rheumatoid arthritis” OR “systemic lupus erythematosus” OR “systemic sclerosis” OR “vasculitis” OR “myositis” OR “rheumatology” AND “COVID-19”. All selected articles were analyzed according to various aspects: type of document, authorship, journal, citations score, rheumatology field, country of origin, language, and keywords. We have built the visualizing keywords network (Figure 1) with the help of software tool VOSviewer version 1.6.15 (the minimum keyword occurrence threshold was set at 5).Figure 1.Results:A total of 844 literature items were obtained. After screening of title, abstract and keywords we excluded 106 records as they were not emphasized the rheumatological perspective on COVID-19 and as a result were inapplicable for this study. The 738 retrieved articles were mostly (86.8%) open access publications. The top five journals that contributed most to the coverage of this topic were: Annals Of The Rheumatic Diseases (n=59), Clinical Rheumatology (n=41), Lancet Rheumatology (n=24), Arthritis And Rheumatology (n=20) and Rheumatology International (n=19). The origin of most studies was not surprisingly from those countries, which belong to the top ten according to the total cases of COVID-19 [1] (USA – 167; Italy – 148; UK – 76; India – 60 and Spain – 58). Most items were written in English but articles in German (n=12), Spanish (n=11), Russian (n=5) and Chinese (n=2) could also be found. Analyzed studies were designed in the form of Original Articles (41.2%), Reviews (23.7%), Letters (21.8), Notes (6.9%), Editorials (5.1%). According to the citations scores, articles of highest interest were dedicated to clinical course of COVID-19 in patients with autoimmune pathologies. The other highly cited studies were about cytokine storm and perspective usage of biological drugs for severe cases of COVID-19. Our analysis of keywords showed that the most widely discussed rheumatic disease in the view of COVID-19 was systemic lupus erythematosus (n=188), followed by vasculitis (n=132), rheumatoid arthritis (n=90), systemic sclerosis (n=32) and psoriatic arthritis (24). The liveliest discussion about disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs in COVID-19 revolved around hydroxychloroquine (n=305), corticosteroids (n=161), tocilizumab (n=83), methotrexate (n=46) and anakinra (n=34).Conclusion:As far as we know, it is the first bibliometric overview of studies dedicated to interrelation between COVID-19 and rheumatic pathology. The high number of open access items contributes to the increase of research visibility in this emergently developing research field and facilitates the process of scientific data sharing. The conducting of bibliographic studies may provide a valuable guide through this area of knowledge.