Regional and National Trends in Tuberculosis Research in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Countries: Post-COVID-19 Pandemic Machine Learning Factorial Analysis

Abstract

Background: The number of tuberculosis (TB)-related morbidities and mortalities is still high in the South-east Asian region. This study was performed to characterize and visualize the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) TB research in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Methods: The Web of Science Core Collection database was utilized. A total of 4822 documents were included in the final analysis according to the predefined eligibility criteria. The data were exported to the R package and VOSviewer software for factorial analysis and network visualization, respectively. Results: The included documents were published in English between 2020 and 2024 in 1255 journals. These documents were authored by 17005 authors (3.53 authors/document). The authors collaboration index was noticed 3.61. In total, 74.16% documents were published as the article. The highest number of documents were published in 2022 (n = 1089). The documents published in 2020 received the highest number of mean total citations per article (n = 8.64). The most published journal was Cureus Journal of Medical Science (n = 228). The most prolific author was Gupta A (n = 115). The most active institution was the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (n = 587). The top most trending topics were Mycobacterium tuberculosis, TB elimination, molecular docking, extrapulmonary TB, Cartridge Based Nucleic Acid Amplification Test, and multidrug resistance. India was the most productive country and had the strongest research collaboration with the United States of America (USA), the United Kingdom (UK), and South Africa. Pakistan was mainly collaborating with the USA, the UK, Saudi Arabia, and China. The India and Pakistan collaboration was observed only in 66 documents. Conclusion: There is a poor output of scientific publication on TB in most SAARC countries. However, it is recognized that India has produced the highest number of scientific publications. The detection of undiagnosed post-COVID-19 pandemic TB cases is crucial to control further cases in the region. An effective regional cooperation should be established among institutions, universities, and countries to achieve the World Health Organization End TB goals.