Deadly Marburg virus outbreak received sustained attention: What can we learn from the existing studies?

Dear Editor, Marburg virus disease (MVD), formerly known as Marburg hemorrhagic fever, is a serious and frequently fatal illness in humans caused by the Marburg virus (MARV), which belongs to the Filoviridae family along with another more notorious Ebola virus. MARV has the characteristics of high infectivity and a fatality rate of up to 80–90%. As early as 2015, World Health Organization (WHO) listed it as a key infectious disease that might cause a pandemic and required high attention. And in 2018, WHO further placed it on the list of pathogens with epidemic and the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) potential. Meanwhile, the 2014–2016 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa made MARV also a global concern together, which promoted the development of prevention and control work, and corresponding scientific research and diagnostic products. Recently, WHO successively announced the outbreak of MARV in Equatorial Guinea and the United Republic of Tanzania. This highly lethal virus once again became a hot topic of the whole society. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is still lacking a detailed report to summarize the current state and research hotspots of the field. In view of this, the current study was designed to perform a systematic bibliometric analysis of the countries, institutions, authors, keywords, and cited literature in this field for providing a reference for future research communication and cooperation. As a consequence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the field of infectious diseases has been a considerable contributor to biomedical literature and one of the most exciting areas for bibliometric analysis. In this study, the document retrieval was restricted to the terms like ‘Marburg virus*’, ‘Marburgvirus’, ‘Marburg haemorrhagic fever’, ‘Marburg hemorrhagic fever’ from theWeb of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) on 10 April 2023. There are no restrictions for a retrieval time frame, and only ‘original research articles or review articles’ published in English were considered for data analysis. After initial screening and duplicate removal, an online analysis platform, CiteSpace 6.2. R2, and VOSviewer 1.16. 16 software were used for bibliometric analysis. A total of 880 qualified publications, including 759 articles and 121 reviews, were finally identified. The annual distribution of publication number and citation frequency is available in Figure 1A. It can be observed that the first study with the term MARV was published in 1968. As a matter of fact, it was first recognized after simultaneous outbreaks in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, when workers at the research laboratory were infected by nonhuman primate animal products. From the point of view of literature outputs, MARV has not received much scientific attention before 2000, with no more than 10 studies each year. When the time to the 21st century, especially between 2000 and 2015, the world’s research in this field showed a rapid growth trend. In order to figure out the reasons for this tendency, we have marked the year, regions, infected cases, and cumulative deaths of the observed MARV outbreak around the world. It is possible to see that since the beginning of the 21st century, the outbreak frequency and severity levels have been much higher than before. This may be the possible reason why MARV acquires increasing attention. In addition, in order to compare with another Filoviridae family member of the Ebola virus, we also searched all related studies on the Ebola virus from WoSCC. As can be seen from Supplementary Figure 1 (Supplemental Digital Content 1, http://links.lww.com/JS9/ A522), a total of 8174 documents on the Ebola virus was identified, and since 2015, the annual number of publications was more than 500. From this result, it is not difficult to see that MARV-related studies have not received sufficient attention over the past years. Therefore, our results strongly appeal to more extensive studies of MARV to better respond to this potential threat to public health in the future. In total, 79 countries/regions contributed studies in this area, with the United States leading the list with 581 documents (66%), aDepartment of Intensive Care Unit, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, bDepartment of Orthopedics, Baodi Clinical College of Tianjin Medical University, cDepartment of Graduate School, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, dDepartment of Orthopaedic Surgery, Beijing Jishuitan Hospital, Fourth Clinical College of Peking University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China, eDuke Molecular Physiology Institute, Duke University School of Medicine, fDuke Human Vaccine Institute, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA and gCenter for Musculoskeletal Surgery (CMSC), Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, and Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin, Germany