Bibliometric analysis of COVID-19 research in Morocco: short communication

As a global pandemic, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to a growing number of related research studies being published worldwide. However, there is no study on the bibliometric analysis of these Moroccan studies. This study aims to provide a general overview of COVID-19 studies in Morocco and may provide a direction for hot topics and future research trends. METHOD: The global literature about COVID-19 published between 2019 and 2022 was scanned in PubMed, the Web of Science collection database, Scopus, and two preprint platforms. ‘COVID-19’, ‘Novel Coronavirus’, ‘2019-nCoV’, and ‘SARS-CoV-2’ were used as the keywords to reach the relevant publications. The VOS viewer was applied to perform the bibliometric analysis of these articles. RESULTS: A total of 987 Moroccan publications on the topic of COVID-19 were retrieved. Of all these publications, 166 (61.9%) were original journal articles, 10 (3.7%) were review articles, 514 (8.38%) were letters and 56 (20.9%) were others, such as case reports, notes, or book chapters. Ten original articles (3.7%) had not yet been peer-reviewed and were retrieved from the preprint servers medRxiv and bioRxiv. The highest number of COVID-19 publications was published by Mohammed V University in Rabat (n=45, 16.8%), followed by Hassan II University (n=32, 11.9%) and Mohammed VI University of Health Sciences (n=29, 10.8%). The open-access format was the predominant publishing model (43.2%) and 92.9% were written in English. The main research lines identified in COVID-19 for Morocco are related to the pandemic’s indirect effects: education (11.2%), mental health (6.3%), and the environment (6.3%). CONCLUSION: Moroccan institutions have made a profound contribution to COVID-19 research than that in other African countries, but lags behind compared to that in Arabic countries.