key: cord-0799193-pfhn8v7y authors: Çiçek Korkmaz, Ayşe; Altuntaş, Serap title: A bibliometric analysis of COVID‐19 publications in nursing by visual mapping method date: 2022-05-02 journal: J Nurs Manag DOI: 10.1111/jonm.13636 sha: df49e19d4d7b2e54cd9ee9c529a124c1152d1e5a doc_id: 799193 cord_uid: pfhn8v7y AIM: This study conducted a bibliometric analysis of nursing publications on the COVID‐19 between 1 January 2020, and 24 October 2021. BACKGROUND: COVID‐19 has been a hot research topic that has attracted many researchers from various disciplines. One of the ways to combat the COVID‐19 pandemic is to produce knowledge and present it with a holistic approach. Therefore, it is crucial to make bibliometric and content analyses of scientific publications. Scientific data should be evaluated to keep up with the developments in the nursing profession and practices during the COVID‐19 pandemic. METHODS: Data were collected from the Web of Science database. The sample consisted of 1280 publications that met the inclusion criteria. The data were analysed using descriptive content and bibliometric analysis. The VOSviewer, a mapping and visualization software program, was used for bibliometric analysis. RESULTS: The United States is one of the countries with the highest number of publications, citations and international cooperation during the pandemic. Of all these publications, 1183 (92.42%) are original articles. The Journal of Nursing Management has the highest number of publications and citations. The publications focus primarily on the topics of COVID‐19, pandemic, nursing, coronavirus and nurses. The current topics that the publications address are online education, online learning, practice, nursing student, perceived stress, stress, fear, quality of life and experience to determine the impacts of the pandemic on mental health nursing education. CONCLUSIONS: The COVID‐19 pandemic has an impact on nursing, and the number of publications is increasing worldwide. In the early days of the pandemic, researchers focused on the topics of coronavirus infections, infection control, global health, health policy and nursing policy. Afterward, they addressed current topics, such as education and the psychological effects of the pandemic. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT: Our results will help nurse managers identify issues related to COVID‐19 that have not been researched yet and have not been adequately explained in their own institutions. They will also help them choose appropriate journals to get their studies published, appropriate countries to cooperate with and access information about the studies on the subject matter. Our results will also help them make evidence‐based decisions about mental health and nursing education. The novel coronavirus disease is an infectious disease with high morbidity and mortality and a significant impact on health care professionals and society. The novel coronavirus disease broke out in Wuhan/China at the end of 2019 and spread to 216 countries as of 11 June 2020. The World Health Organization declared it a pandemic, which has been a global health problem (Lippi et al., 2020; World Health Organization [WHO] , 2020). Countries have developed emergency action plans in health care, economy and social life against the COVID-19 pandemic and introduced numerous preventive measures and restrictions with the integration of the pandemic with 'controlled social life' (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural [UNESCO] , 2020). Therefore, the COVID-19 has attracted many researchers from various disciplines in a short time. Research on COVID-19 is of great significance both for controlling the disease and caring for and treating patients (Chahrour et al., 2020) . Using bibliometric methods to analyse the results of studies on pandemics helps us identify, understand and solve problems . We should employ bibliometric methods to evaluate published articles to keep the global impacts of under control, to reduce infection rates and to develop and improve treatment, care, and prevention methods. The results of bibliometric analysis studies also help nurse managers and researchers make the most appropriate decisions and predict future developments (Furstenau et al., 2021; Tao et al., 2020) . The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the importance of the nursing profession worldwide. Scientific studies have gained momentum in nursing, as in every field. In times of crisis, evidence-based information is a key for all nurses to deliver optimal care. In addition, the bibliometric analysis of scientific publications provides an in-depth perspective and helps researchers keep up with advances in nursing and nursing practices and make necessary improvements. However, there is limited bibliometric analysis on this topic (Hao et al., 2020; Oh & Kim, 2020) . This study will fill this gap. This study aims to use bibliometric analysis techniques to define the current status of publications on COVID-19 in nursing, identify gaps in the literature and offer suggestions about those gaps and present a holistic picture of the topic of COVID-19. In this way, it will help nurse researchers familiarize themselves with the nascent field of COVID-19 and keep up with related developments. It will summarize the results of current scientific publications and help make them more visible. The research questions in line with the purpose of the study are as follows: The research question: What is the current knowledge structure and development of publications on nursing and COVID-19? • What is the distribution of the number of studies published between 2020 and 2021? • What countries publish the most publications? • What journals have published the most publications? • What are the most cited (most influential) journals, publications, authors and countries? • What kind of cooperation exists between authors and between countries? • What are the most studied topics or concepts depending on the keywords of publications? This study used bibliometric analysis techniques to fulfil the purpose of the research and to find answers to the research questions. Bibliometric: Bibliometrics, which is a quantitative analysis, provides significant convenience in identifying studies that represent a topic (Şimşir, 2021, p. 16) . This study used citation analysis, co-author analysis and co-word analysis, which are bibliometric analysis techniques. The citation analysis focuses on the number of citations to reveal the impact of articles, authors, journals and countries. Before doing research on the topic, we can quickly identify the most influential articles, authors, journals and countries through citation analysis (Ba gış, 2021, p. 99; Erdo gan, 2021) . The co-author analysis involves the participation of two or more authors in producing a publication. This analysis provides us with an image of social networks that emerge as a result of collaborations between authors and between countries (Huang & Chang, 2011; Talan, 2021) . The main point of a co-word analysis is words. Therefore, we used co-word analysis to examine the relationship between concepts or words in the titles, abstracts or keywords of studies in a research field (Ba gış, 2021, p. 107). This study used only co-occurrence of keyword analysis for co-word analysis. The data were collected from the Web of Science Core Collection (4) repeated publications; and (5) publications not officially published. Finally, a total of 1280 publications were retrieved. All the bibliographic data were exported from the WoS database to an Excel spreadsheet ('savedrecs.xls'). The data were analysed using descriptive content and bibliometric content analysis. The descriptive content analysis was performed on WoSCC. The bibliometric analysis was performed using the VOSviewer The first step of the bibliometric analysis was a citation analysis conducted on the publications accessed on WoSCC. Table 2 Within the scope of this study, citation analysis was performed to determine the most cited authors in the field of COVID-19. It was determined that the total number of authors in the publications examined was 5375. The study focused on 226 authors with at least two publications and six citations. Each colour represented a cluster. There were nine clusters (Figure 3 ), and the most cited authors were in the same cluster. Among these clusters, the red and orange clusters in the centre are larger and more prominent than the others. These two clusters show that the most-cited authors are included and have more detailed relationships with many clusters. The Chinese researchers, F I G U R E 1 Distribution of publications by year, type and language Deng L., Huang H., Lang Q., Liao C., Mo Y., Wang N. and Zhang L., were the most cited authors, with an equal number of citations (two publications, 220 citations) and seemed to collaborate. These authors were followed by Labrague L. J. (six publications, 198 citations) and de los Santos (three publications, 193 citations). Third, citation analysis was performed on the 10 journals with the most citations. Figure 4 shows the related findings. Co-author analysis was performed on the publications. Figure Figure 8b shows the cloud of words. As in the visual network maps, bigger images in Figure 8b indicated more common words. The impact on patient outcomes (Oermann et al., 2008) . According to the co-author analysis, co-authors produced joint publications by collaborating more than once. As in the earlier outbreaks, the World Health Organization stated that we should emphasize international cooperation to help us make more valid and reliable decisions about effective therapeutic interventions against the COVID-19 pandemic (Farooq et al., 2021) . The co-author analysis showed that the authors from the United States, Australia, England and China collaborated with other countries the most. The United States and China were in the same cluster. These results indicate that international cooperation between nurse researchers is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic. Keyword analysis can give us information about important topics and developmental trends in nursing research during the COVID-19 pandemic (Hao et al., 2020) . The frequency of these keywords indicates the most researched topics. Current issues are always changing, but they reflect fundamental issues in the field and allow us to understand research trends in the field (Liu et al., 2021 (Hamidah et al., 2020; Hossain, 2020) . Researchers will likely focus on other aspects of the pandemic as it seems like it will not be over anytime soon and vaccination will change its course. Our results evaluate new opportunities potential publication areas and trends and therefore will guide academics and professionals who want to do research in this field. This study is important because it gives an idea about the research and publication performance of countries on nursing and COVID-19. Countries should provide incentives/support to improve the performance of their nurse researchers to conduct further research on COVID-19. This will also be reflected in the measurement results of countries' research and publication performance. This study received no specific funding. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. 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The two authors have contributed to this work as follows: study conception and design: AÇK; data collection: AÇK; data analysis and interpretation: AÇK and SA; drafting of the article: AÇK; critical revision of the article: AÇK and SA. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Web of Science at https://www.webofscience.com/. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8184-1490Serap Altuntaş https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7695-7736