Using the Alluvial diagram to display variable characteristics for COVID-19 patients and research achievements on the topic of COVID-19, epidemiology, pathogenesis, and vaccine (CEPV): Bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Background: An Alluvial diagram illustrates the flow of values from one set to another. Edges (or links/connections) are the connections between nodes (or actors/ vertices). There has been an increase in the use of Alluvial deposits in medical research in recent years. However, there was no illustration of such research on the way to draw the Alluvial for the readers. Our objective was to demonstrate how to draw the Alluvial in Microsoft Excel by using 2 examples, including variable characteristics for COVID-19 patients and research achievements (RAs) on the topic of COVID-19, epidemiology, pathogenesis, and vaccine (CEPV), and provide an easy and friendly method of drawing the Alluvial in MS Excel. Methods: Blood samples were collected and analyzed from 485 infected individuals in Wuhan, China. An operational decision tree and 2 Alluvial diagrams were shown to be capable of identifying variable characteristics in COVID-19 patients. A second example is the 100 top-cited articles downloaded from the Web of Science core collection (WoSCC) on the CEPV topic. On the Alluvial diagram, the mean citations (=citations/publications) and x-index were used to identify the top 5 members with the highest RAs in each entity (country, institute, journal, and research area). Two examples (i.e., blood samples taken from 485 infected individuals in Wuhan, China, and 100 top-cited articles on the CEPV topic) were illustrated and compared with traditional visualizations without flow relationships between nodes. Results: The top members in entities with the x-index are U Arab Emirates (242), Jama-J. Am. Med. Assoc. (27.18), Lancet (58.34), San Francisco Va Med (178), and Chaolin Huang (189) in countries, institutes, departments, and authors, respectively. The most cited article with 1315 citations was written by Huang and his colleagues and published by Lancet in 2021. Conclusion: This study generates several Alluvial diagrams as demonstrations. The tutorial material and MP4 video provided in the Excel module allow readers to draw the Alluvial on their own in an easy and friendly manner.