Covid-19 and Aged People: A Scientometric Analysis of High-Cited Publications

Background: The study analyzed and evaluated the scientific research on “Covid-19 and Aged People” to find out the current status of research and to identify significant players (countries, organizations and authors) and important topics from the 469 high-cited publications receiving 100 and more citations using bibliometric methods. Methods: High-cited publications published from December 2019 to June 2021 were identified and analyzed. A list keywords were identified for Covid-19 (“Covid 19” or “2019 novel Coronavirus” or “Coronavirus 2019” or “Coronavirus disease 2019” or “2019-novel CoV” OR “2019 ncov” or “Covid 2019” or “Covid19” or “Corona virus 2019” or “ncov-2019” or “ncov2019” or “nCoV 2019” or “2019-ncov” or “covid-19” or “Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” or “SARS-CoV-2”) and Aged People (“Aged” or “Elderly” or “Old” or “Very Elderly”) and these keywords are used for search on the topic of study (the title, abstract, keywords). Results: A total of 469 high-cited publications were obtained on this topic, which registered 449.5 citations per paper and witnessed the participation of 64 countries, with China, USA and U.K. leading in global publication productivity (with 189, 162 and 70 publications each) and China (687.25), Singapore (409.20) and Switzerland (396.41) leading in citation impact per paper. The 2123 organizations and 5896 authors participated in these 469 high-cited publications. Huazong University of Science and Technology, China, Wuhan University, China and University of Oxford, U.K. leads in publications productivity (with 66, 37 and 20 publications each) and Capital Medical University, China, University of Hong Kong (1454.6) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China leads in citations impact per paper. L. Liu, J. Chen and Y. Hu leads in publications productivity (with 16, 13 and 13 publications each) and Y. Liu (17100.5), Y.Hu (15395.5) and L. Zhang (15079.0) leads in citations impact per paper. New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet and JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association leads in both publication productivity and citations impact per paper. The keywords that appeared most were “Covid-19” and “Aged People” which had a strong links with “mortality”, “hospitalization”, “hypertension”, “respiratory failure”, “diabetes mellitus”, “chronic kidney failure”, “anxiety:, “depression” and “mental health”. Conclusion: The current bibliometric analysis provides information about the quantity and quality of research in this area based on published literature. It provides information on current status of research in this area to decision-makers and practicing scholars and provides important clues about upcoming research topics for future research.