Objectives: The study presents a bibliometric assessment of COVID-19 vaccine research publications to understand the current and up-to-date scenario of COVID-19 vaccine research and to track important research players and identify the current areas. Materials and Methods: The global literature on COVID-19 vaccine research published during 2020 were searched in the Scopus database, using the keywords “COVID-19 vaccine” or “Coronavirus 19 vaccine” on 12 September 2020. The 343 global records on COVID-19 vaccine research were obtained which received 2636 citations and were published in 66 countries involving 280 organizations, 259 authors and 191 journals. The publication records obtained were statistically analyzed by using various bibliometric indices: document type, country, collaboration patterns, affiliation, journal name, and citation patterns. Results: Among top 12 countries, USA, U.K and China were the most productive and China, South Korea and USA were the most impactful. Nearly 51% publications of these top 12 countries were international collaborative. The top most productive organizations were Harvard Medical School, USA (12 papers), University of Washington, Seattle, USA (10 papers) and Fudan University, China (with 12, 10 and 8 papers. Th. top most impactful organizations in terms of citation per paper and relative citation index were Tongji Medical College, China (56.0 and 7.28), Shanghai Medical College, China (33.2 and 4.32) and Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, China (23.5 and 3.06). The most productive journals were Nature, Science and Vaccine (24, 18 and 18 papers each) and the most impactful journals in terms of citations per paper were: Journal of Medical Virology (66.5), Cell (27.2) and New England Journal of Medicine (23.4). Conclusion: This results and findings emerging from the study shed new light on the major progress in the present time on hot topics on COVID-19 vaccine research.
Key words: COVID-19, Vaccine, Global publications, Bibliometrics, Scientometrics.
