Influenza Global Scholarly Publications in the Mirror of the Co-word Analysis Technique

Abstract

Background and Aim: Influenza is a global epidemic disease that always causes irreparable damage to individuals and countries' health, and the amount of research in this area is increasing. The primary purpose is to discover the hidden patterns and emerging events of global Influenza publications.Methods: This article is an applied type that has been done with an analytical approach and using the Co-word analysis method. This research's statistical population includes all the keywords of documents indexed with influenza's subject in the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC) in the last two decades (2000-2019). The number of keywords studied in this article is 26767. MeSH was used to determine the search strategy for document retrieval. SPSS and UCINET software were used for data analysis, and VOSviewer was utilized for drawing the map.Results: The keywords "Avian Influenza" and "Influenza Vaccine" with a frequency of 1302 and 1264 were the most frequent keywords in the subject area of influenza. Findings related to the analysis of clusters by the hierarchical clustering method led to the creation of 21 clusters in the field of influenza. Seventeen clusters with the most keywords were the largest cluster. The strategic diagram indicated that most influenza subject area clusters are located in the third quadrant of the strategic diagram and are considered emerging or declining subjects.Discussion and Conclusion: Discovering the intellectual structure, presenting hidden patterns and emerging events of global publications in the field of influenza can potentially help governments, communities, and research centers in understanding research advances, optimizing and managing future research topics, and effectively monitoring and policy-making activities—new research and allocation of facilities and budget.