key: cord-307362-1bxx4db2 authors: Salmerón-Manzano, Esther; Manzano-Agugliaro, Francisco title: Bibliometric Studies and Worldwide Research Trends on Global Health date: 2020-08-09 journal: Int J Environ Res Public Health DOI: 10.3390/ijerph17165748 sha: doc_id: 307362 cord_uid: 1bxx4db2 Global health, conceived as a discipline, aims to train, research and respond to problems of a transboundary nature in order to improve health and health equity at the global level. The current worldwide situation is ruled by globalization, and therefore the concept of global health involves not only health-related issues but also those related to the environment and climate change. Therefore, in this Special Issue, the problems related to global health have been addressed from a bibliometric approach in four main areas: environmental issues, diseases, health, education and society. Science aims to answer questions, and from a pragmatic approach, science can be understood as a resolution of problems in our society. Science cannot be considered an independent activity, and therefore, it must be remembered that prior studies have been carried out in any given scientific field. Combining scientific aspects with documental aspects gives rise to a certain type of scientific work: scientometric, bibliometric, and informetric studies. These take different titles according to the final approach of the work, such as the following: examining the scholarly literature, evolution, and new trends; worldwide research trends; mapping of the knowledge base; visualizing the knowledge structure; analysis of global research; publication trends; knowledge domain visualization. Scientific literature is losing its relevance more and more quickly, but the aging of literature is not uniform for all scientific subjects. This means that being up to date in a scientific field requires bibliometric studies through which new trends are revealed when undertaking scientific studies of interest to the community. Two topics of special interest to society today are environmental research and public health, and within these larger topics are sub-topics related to global health. Global health, in a broad context, refers to improving health worldwide, reducing disparities, and protecting against global threats that do not consider national borders. This Special Issue aims to provide a global view of all of these global health issues, and through bibliometric studies, we believe that this objective can be achieved. Therefore, articles reviewing the state of the art in any of these fields, bibliometric or scientometric studies, and research articles dealing with a global perspective are welcome. The summary of the call for papers for this Special Issue on the 28 manuscripts submitted: rejected (12; 43%) and published (16; 67%). The submitted manuscripts come from many countries and are summarized in Table 1 . For this statistic only the first affiliation of the authors has been considered, in which it gives the opportunity to observe 66 authors from nine countries. Note that it is common for a manuscript to be signed by more than one author and for authors to belong to different affiliations. The average number of authors per published manuscript in this Special Issue was seven authors. There are 23 different affiliations of the authors. Note that only the first affiliation per author has been considered. Table 2 summarizes the authors and their first affiliations. Table 3 summarizes the research conducted by the authors in this Special Issue, by identifying the areas to which they report. It was noted that they have been grouped into four main lines of research: environmental issues, diseases, health and society. They have mainly explored the issue of disease research, these have been: COVID-19, asthma, pulmonary disease, HIV/AIDS, and diabetes. Related to health, they were: medicinal plants, musculoskeletal risks, and obesity. The environmental issues were related to: microplastics, climate change, and wastewater treatment. Finally, research related to education and society: academic performance, patents, bibliometric analysis, and social networks and young people. Table 3 . Topics for worldwide research trends on global health. Current State and Future Trends: A Citation Network Analysis of the Academic Performance Field Global Research Output and Theme Trends on Climate Change and Infectious Diseases: A Restrospective Bibliometric and Co-Word Biclustering Investigation of Papers Indexed in PubMed (1999-2018) Studies of Novel Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) Pandemic: A Global Analysis of Literature The Contribution of Spanish Science to Patents: Medicine as Case of Study Global Mapping of Research Trends on Interventions to Improve Health-Related Quality of Life in Asthma Patients Interventions to Improve the Quality of Life of Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Global Mapping During A Scientometric Analysis of Global Health Research Global research on quality of life of patients with HIV/AIDS: Is it socio-culturally addressed Modeling the Research Landscapes of Artificial Intelligence Applications in Diabetes (GAPRESEARCH) Global Mapping of Interventions to Improve Quality of Life of People with Diabetes in 1990-2018 Wastewater treatment by advanced oxidation process and their worldwide research trends Characterizing Obesity Interventions and Treatment for Children and Youths During 1991-2018 A bibliometric analysis of the health field regarding social networks and young people Musculoskeletal Risks: RULA Bibliometric Review Bibliometric Profile of Global Microplastics Research from 2004 to 2019 Author Contributions: The authors all made equal contributions to this article. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.Funding: This research received no external funding. The authors state that there are no conflict of interest.