Mapping global research trends in diabetes and COVID-19 outbreak in the past year: a bibliometric analysis

Diabetes is an independent risk factor for COVID-19 patients, and SARS-CoV-2 infection may in turn induce hyperglycemia. In this work, we will map the trends of global research of COVID-19 and diabetes by using the method of bibliometric analysis, help researchers quickly understand the research hotspots and find meaningful research directions.

Documents related to COVID-19 and diabetes were obtained from the database of Science Citation Index Expanded of Web of Science. We then analysed the data by country/organization coauthorship analysis, sources/documents citation analysis, and keywords co-occurrence analysis. VOSviewer was applied to map the global research trends and hotspots in this field.

A total of 1,206 articles were retrieved, including a total of 101 countries, 2,595 organizations, 526 journals, and 3,405 keywords. China had the highest total citations, followed by the United States, while these two countries were reversed in terms of the number of documents. Half of the top 10 highly cited organizations were from China, including Capital Medical University, which had the highest citations, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, which had the largest number of documents. Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice was the most productive journal. Journal of Medical Virology was the most highly cited journal. Zhou et al.'s article (The Lancet, 2020) was the most representative and widely cited. The keywords mainly focused on 3 categories, namely risk factors & clinical outcomes, receptor ACE2 & cytokine storm, as well as clinical characteristics & epidemiology. Among them, hyperglycemia, obesity, outcomes, and cytokine storm are the hotspots of recent concern.

This research mapped the global research trends in COVID-19 and diabetes, which may help researchers identify relevant collaborators and discover current hotspots and potential research directions.