Update on the COVID-19 Vaccine Research Trends: A Bibliometric Analysis

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is ravaging the world. To date, there are no standard therapies available to cure the disease. Consequently, research on COVID-19 vaccines is booming. This report aimed to assess the research trends of the global COVID-19 vaccines. Methods: The relevant publications on the COVID-19 vaccines were searched in the Web of Science Core Collection Database (WOSCC) database from December 2019 to 11 August 2021. The VOSviewer1.6.16 was used to assess the co-authorship, cooccurrence, citation of countries, institutions, authors, journals, and hotspot keywords. The HistCite (TM) (http://www.histcite.com/) software was used to calculate the total local citation score (TLCS) and total global citation score (TGCS) of each variable and generate the citation historiography graph of COVID-19 vaccine development using the citation time series analysis method. Results: A total of 5070 studies authored by 21,151 researchers and published by 1364 different journals were eventually included in this study. The bulk of the retrieved studies were original articles (n = 2401, 47.36%). Among these studies, 1204 (23.75%) were published in 2020. A total of 3863 (76.19%) were published in 2021 and 4295 (84.71%) were open access. The highest number of studies was conducted in the USA, followed by England, China, and Germany. The main partners of the USA were China, England, and Canada. The University of Maryland (TLCS: 1618, TGCS: 2991) and Prof. Ugur Sahin from the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University (TLCS: 1397, TGCS: 2407) were the most cited institution and author, respectively. The vaccines featured the highest number of papers, with 294 publications (TLCS: 0, TGCS: 1226). The most cited journal was the New England Journal of Medicine (TLCS: 3310, TGCS: 5914), with an impact factor (IF) of 91.245. The related topics included the following six aspects: attitudes towards vaccination, immunoinformatics analysis, clinical research, effectiveness and side effects, and the public management of vaccines. The timing diagram revealed that the research hotspots focused on the side effects of vaccines and public attitude towards vaccination. Conclusion: This novel comprehensive bibliometric analysis can help researchers and nonresearchers to rapidly identify the potential partners, landmark studies, and research topics within their domains of interest. Through this study, we hope to provide more data to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.