Objectives
The pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has led to the rapid publication of numerous radiology articles, primarily focused on disease diagnosis. The objective of this study is to analyze the intellectual structure of radiology research on COVID-19 using a citation and co-citation analysis.
Methods
We identified all documents about COVID-19 published in radiology journals included in the Web of Science in the period 2020–2021, conducting a citation analysis. Then we identified all bibliographic references that were cited by these documents, generating a co-citation matrix that was used to perform a co-citation network.
Results
Of the 3418 documents indexed in WoS, 857 were initially “Early Access,” 2223 had citations, 393 had more than 20 citations, and 83 had more than 100 citations. The USA had the highest number of publications (32.62%) and China had the highest rate of funded studies (45.38%). The three authors with the most publications were affiliated with Italian institutions, while the five most cited authors were Chinese. A total of 647 publications were co-cited at least 12 times and were published in 206 different journals, with 49% of the documents found in radiology journals. The institutions with the greatest presence among these co-cited articles were Chinese and American.
Conclusion
This co-citation analysis is the first to focus exclusively on radiology articles on COVID-19. Our study confirms the existence of interrelated thematic clusters with different specific weights.
Key Points
• As the pandemic caused by SARS-Cov-2 has led to the rapid publication of numerous radiology studies in a short time period, a bibliometric review based on citation and co-citation analysis has been conducted.
• The co-citation analysis supported the identification of key themes in the study of COVID-19 in radiology publications.
• Many of the most co-cited articles belong to a heterogeneous group of publications, with authors from countries that are far apart and even from different disciplines
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Cross-sectional imaging of the upper abdomen, especially if intravenous contrast has been administered, will most likely reveal any acute or chronic disease harbored in the spleen. Unless imaging is performed with the specific purpose of evaluating the spleen or characterizing a known splenic lesion, incidentally discovered splenic lesions pose a small challenge. Solitary benign splenic lesions include cysts, hemangiomas, sclerosing angiomatous nodular transformation (SANT), hamartomas, and abscesses, among others. Sarcoidosis and tuberculosis, although predominantly diffuse micronodular disease processes, may also present as a solitary splenic mass lesion. In addition, infarction and rupture, both traumatic and spontaneous, may take place in the spleen. This review aims to describe the imaging features of the most common benign focal splenic lesions, with emphasis on the imaging findings as these are encountered on routine cross-sectional imaging from a multicenter pool of cases that, coupled with clinical information, can allow a definite diagnosis.
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