Tuberculosis research advances and future trends: A bibliometric knowledge mapping approach

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are more vulnerable to many transmissible diseases, including tuberculosis (TB). This study is to identify the scientific publications related to TB in the GCC countries using topic modeling and co-word analysis. A bibliometric analytic study. The R-package, VOSviewer software, IBM SPPS, and Scopus Analytics were used to analyze performance, hotspots, knowledge structure, thematic evolution, trend topics, and inter-gulf and international cooperation on TB in the past 30 years (1993-2022). A total of 1999 publications associated with research on GCC-TB were published. The annual growth rate of documents was 7.76%. Saudi Arabia is the most highly published, followed by the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. The most-cited GC country is Kingdom Saudi Arabia, followed by Kuwait. One hundred sixty research institutions contributed to the dissemination of TB-related knowledge in the GCC, where the highest publishing organizations were King Saud University (Kingdom Saudi Arabia; n = 518). The number of publications related to TB is high in GCC Countries. The current tendencies indicated that GCC scholars are increasingly focused on deep learning, chest X-ray, molecular docking, comorbid covid-19, risk factors, and Mycobacterium bovis.