The Impact of Covid-19 on Mental Health: A Global Analysis of Publications

Covid-19 infection, which emerged in late 2019, spread across the world rapidly and was declared as a pandemic on 24th March 2020 by the World Health Organization. Besides other implications, Covid-19 pandemic led to significant mental health issues in the general public, those infected with the virus and the health care workers. Over the period of 15-16 months, a significant amount of literature has emerged on the mental health issues in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. This paper aims to evaluate the research trends in mental health related to Covid-19 infection by using the bibliometric analysis. Using the Scopus database, as on 21st of March 2021, 15,223 records focusing on “Covid-19 and Mental Health” were identified. The research on this theme averaged 8.90 citations per paper with 13.77% publications supported by funding agencies from global research agencies/firms were published. Researchers from 158 countries participated in mental health research on Covid-19, with top 12 countries accounting for 95.91% share of the global output and a major share of global citations in the subject. Although researchers from USA, U.K. and China led the global publication share (ranging from 10.40% to 26.56%), but researchers from China, France and Australia registered higher relative citation index (ranging from 1.19 to 2.31). Researchers from Harvard Medical School, USA, University of Toronto, Canada, and King’s College, London, U.K. were the most productive (with 299, 270 and 222 papers). Researchers from the National University of Singapore (51.84 and 5.83), King’s College, London, U.K. (27.23 and 3.06), Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China (23.65 and 2.66) were most impactful in terms of citation per paper and relative citation index. To conclude, this bibliometric analysis provides an overview of the extent of research activities in Covid-19 and mental health.