Bibliometric Analysis on Dengue Virus (Preprint)
Authors: Arshad Mehwish , Saad Missen Malik Muhammad , Qamar Ali Mustapha , Husnain Mujtaba , Choi Gyu Sang 
Published: January 2021

BACKGROUND

Dengue is an acute pyretic disease spread by the mosquito-borne dengue virus. It is a self-limiting illness, characterized by fever, myalgia, headache, and rash, and its severe forms are hemorrhagic fever and shock syndrome may lead to multisystem participation and death. The dengue was originated in animals specifically in the monkeys that further overturned into human beings about 500 years ago. Initially, this virus was observed in the subcontinents of Africa and Southeast Asia in mid of 20th century. The dengue viruses in viremic individuals and the Aedes aegypti mosquito (yellow fever mosquito) were the main factors involved in spreading this virus throughout tropical Southeast Asia via maritime shipments. A number of experiments were performed in the last two decades for the remedy of this disease that needs to be arranged in some manageable form for extracting research-oriented information.

OBJECTIVE

The bibliometric analysis is one of the popular approaches to analyzing the literature review that helps in the mapping of research and development (R&D) activities. We implement this analysis model in illustrating and quantifying the scientific scenario related to dengue research worldwide. While performing the bibliometric analysis we can produce scalable results from an individual to an international level by depicting the collaboration of each author, the role of the impact factor of highly active journals, etc.

METHODS

In order to perform the above-mentioned task, the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases were selected as the repository of the noteworthy research work done in various tasks related to the dengue virus. In total, 18607 publications were considered within the period 1872-2019. Among these, a total of 9664 and 30604 documents were retrieved from WoS and Scopus databases respectively. After merging the data and eliminating the duplicates, the total number of publications was 32150. Furthermore, on the basis of the titles and abstracts, a total of 18607 studies were retrieved related to dengue virus research excluding the studies related to other diseases and viruses. The retrieved documents include articles, books, conference papers, data papers, editorials, erratum, letters, meeting abstracts, news items, notes, proceeding papers, reprint, review, and short survey papers. The metadata of the retrieved publications contains the information including the date of publication, authors, affiliation, digital object identifier (DOI), the title, abstract, name of the journal, and keywords, among other key aspects that were managed in Excel. For visualization and analysis purposes, state-of-art tools like Mendeley, Microsoft Excel, Biblioshiny, and VOS-viewer (version 1.6.15) were used.

RESULTS

After performing a careful analysis of the retrieved 18607 publications, it was observed that about 79.00% (14625) of the total articles were the original research papers, 5.99% (1115) were review and survey articles, 4.72% (878) were the editorial letters and remaining 3.41% (635) were the conference proceedings. Furthermore, it was also witnessed that 90.57% (16844) of the collected research articles were published in English and the remaining 9.47% (1763) are published in other languages. Among the journals that published these articles, the international journal “American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene” stood first having the highest number of papers (698) published in this journal. The research group of academic institutes of Mahidol University, University of Malaya, and the National University of Singapore contributed more than the other universities. The average citation of the top 15 articles was found to be 1,213. The paper having the title “The Global Distribution and Burden of Dengue” was the most cited (3833) as compared with other papers. The network visualization maps conclude that the most frequent terms that appeared in the papers were dengue, dengue virus, antibodies, female, aedes, mosquito, virus replication, epidemic, dengue vaccine.

CONCLUSIONS

The bibliometric analysis concluded that there is a strong bonding between the authors and institutions for instance Mr. HARRIS E from The University of California, USA is found to be the most productive author with 158 published articles. In general, this study not only demonstrates a full understanding of global dengue virus research but also can contribute to forthcoming further research in this field.