Scientometric Mapping of Scientific Production on COVID-19 and the Practice of Exclusive Breastfeeding.

Abstract

Background: To determine the characteristics of scientific production related to exclusive breastfeeding during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Materials and methods: The Scopus database was used to extract metadata. Data on the number of papers and citations were extracted for countries, public and private institutions, journal metrics, most productive authors, and collaboration patterns. VOSviewer was used to visually represent the geographic distribution of global research.

Results: A total of 1529 papers were obtained from the Scopus database, and 258 papers were excluded. Publications published in 2020 are mainly found in Q2. They also had higher national collaboration (38.90%) and citation rate per publication of 15.7. Among the universities that published scientific papers on the subject, the University of Milan had the highest number of scientific publications according to the top 10 institutions (n = 8), but University College London had a greater impact (n = 258). Similarly, for the review according to article production, the Journal of Human Lactation ranked first with a total of 19 publications. However, The Lancet, despite its position in the ninth place among the top ten countries, had higher citation potential and impact (13.1 and 179, respectively).

Conclusions: According to the productivity index in the top ten categories of most productive authors, Marienelli stood out the most, unlike Mosca, who had a higher publication influence and citations per publication (219 and 43.8, respectively). Most of the publications on this subject were published in high-impact Q2 journals. Europe (Italy) has been the leading country in this field of research.