Global Scientific Productivity of Top Four Journals of Virology Over Three Decades: A Scientometrics Study

Trends in Virology research have been inclined after outbreak of COVID 19 pandemic. The main objective of this study is to identifying and visualizing the scientometric indicators of top four highly productive journals publishing papers on area related to Virology research. The data collected on 5 January 2022 from Web of Science all relevant global publications of Virology research. Then, publications were restricted to top 4 highly productive journals in this field. An Exploratory and descriptive analysis of bibliographic data (number of publication/citations yearly output, growth rate, authorship and collaborative pattern, productive countries) by using Bibexcel, MS Excel and VOS viewer software packages were used. The top ranked journals of virology ranked as Journal of Virology (N= 37205, 51.50%), Virology Journal (N= 15052, 20.83%), Journal of General Virology (N= 10745, 14.87%) and Archives of Virology (N= 9238, 12.79%) respectively. Cross-country comparison reveals that the USA is currently taking the leading role, followed by the UK, Germany & Japan and China is a newcomer with potential contributions to make in this research area. The present study offers important quantitative information on top journals of Virology. In addition, researchers are increasingly investigating the intellectual structures of disciplines by using various bibliometric techniques.