Scientometric Analysis of Top 100 Most Cited Articles on Imaging in COVID-19: The Pandemic of Publications

Abstract

AbstractThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020 was paralleled by an equally overwhelming publication of scientific literature. This scientometric analysis was performed to evaluate the 100 most cited articles on COVID-19 imaging to highlight research trends and identify common characteristics of the most cited works. A search of the Web of Science database was performed using the keywords “COVID CT,” “COVID Radiograph,” and “COVID Imaging” on June 29, 2021. The 100 top cited articles found were arranged in descending order on the basis of citation counts and citations per year and relevant data were recorded. Our search revealed a total of 4,862 articles on COVID-19 imaging published in the years 2020 to 2021. The journal with maximum number of publications (n = 22), citation count (n = 8,788), and impact was Radiology. Citations for the top 100 articles ranged from 70 to 1,742 with the most cited article authored by A.I. Tao and published in Radiology. Two authors tied at first spot, having maximum impact, with both having 5 publications and a total of 3,638 citations among them. China was the leading country with both the maximum number of publications (n = 49) and total citations (n = 13,892), the United States coming second in both. This study evaluates publication and citation trends in literature and shows that the countries most affected by the pandemic early on have contributed to the majority of the literature. Furthermore, it will help radiologists to refer to the most popular and important article texts on which to base their unbiased and confident diagnoses.