Covid-19 and Heart Diseases: A Scientometric Assessment of Global Publications during 2020-21

Background: Many patients with Covid-19 have underlying cardiovascular disease or develop acute cardiac injury during the course of the illness. Adequate understanding of the interplay between Covid-19 and Cardiovascular disease is required for optimum management of these patients. The study analyzed and evaluated the global publication output on “Covid-19 and Heart Diseases” to find out the current trends and present status of research, by identifing important countries, organizations, authors and journals and important topics and keywords from the global publications, using bibliometric methods. Methods: Relevant published literature from December 2019 to August 2021 were identified and analyzed on the topic “Covid-19 and Heart Diseases” using a well-defined search strategy in Scopus database. A list of 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 Heart Diseases (cardi* or arrhythmia or myocardial* or heart*) and these keywords are used for search in “Keywords” and Title” tags of Scopus database, yielding 5298 records. Results: A total of 5298 relevant publications indexed in Scopus database were obtained on “Covid-19 and Heart Disease”, which received 62459 citations, averaging 11.79 citations per paper. The total publications witnessed the participation of 123 countries, with USA, Italy, U.K. and China leading in global publication productivity (with 1757, 707, 551 and 413 papers) and China (35.31 and 2.99), France (23.01 and 1.95), Germany (23.0 and 1.95) and Italy (20.43 and 1.73) leading in citation impact per publication and relative citation index. The 1761 organizations and 2499 authors participated in these 5298 publications. Harvard Medical School, USA, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, USA and Massachsetts General Hospital leads in publications productivity (with 178, 92 and 92 publications each) and New York Presbyterian Hospital, USA (121.53 and 10.31), Tongji Medical College, China (65.65 and 5.57) and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China (65.41 and 5.55) leads in citations impact per paper and relative citation index. M. Metra, A. Harky and M.K. Chung leads in publications productivity (with 23, 22 and 153 papers each) and G.Y.H. Lip (U.K.)(114.67 and 9.73), A.J. Kirtane (USA)(109.67 and 9.3) and M. Metra (Italy)(87.04 and 7.38) leads in citations impact per publication and relative citation index. European Heart Journal, Circulation and Stroke leads in publication productivity (with 85, 81 and 73 publications) and JAMA Cardiology (154.23), Journal of the American College of Cardiology (54.99) and Circulation (43.54) leads in citation impact per paper. Major keywords appearing along with “Covid-19 and “Heart Diseases” in co-occurnces were “Cardiovascular Disease” (1176), “Heart Failure” (802), “Hypertension” (664), “Cerebrovascular Accidents” (659), “Stroke” (608), “Mycarditis” (511), “Heart Arrhytthrmia”(464), etc. Conclusion: The study presents the current trends and status of research in the field and indicate the important keywords where research is focused in global literature on cardiovascular manifestations in Covid-19 patients. Such a analysis tmay be useful to the research community and decision-makers to prioritize research needs and identify leading Covid-19 researchers, countries, institutes and authors.