Research on Covid-19 in Europe from 2020-2024: A Citation Analysis Approach for Funded by The National Institute for Health and Care Research, United Kingdom

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted so many people’s everyday lives worldwide, and it is still threatening our society as a whole. The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in several ways that make it particularly challenging and threatening: it is still largely unknown of its origin and transmission routes; there may be months or even longer before COVID-19 vaccines can be expected to be a powerful line of defense; and the prolonged pandemic continues to pose social, economic, and political challenges to businesses and entire industries such as airlines and international travel as well as schools and many other areas. This paper adopts a systematic literature review approach to understand past studies from 2020 to 2024 funded by the National Institute of Health and Care Research in Europe related to COVID-19. This paper summarises the most contributing authors, countries, and journals in the field of COVID-19 by analysing recently published articles from different publishers. Also, with the help of VOS viewer software, the researcher visualized the authors and co-authors and instituted network visualization. The total number of papers was 1,457, which was efficient for conducting the review dated between 2020 and 2024. Publications have decreased steadily from 423 in 2021 to 201 in 2024. SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research topics dominate the dataset, with 124 entries, followed closely by long-term effects (121) and clinical research (111). COVID-19's healthcare impacts (107) and mental health implications (91) represent a significant but smaller portion of the research. University of London is the dominant institution, contributing 35.8% of the total metric means of the top five institutions' publications. The article published in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled Dexamethasone in Hospitalized Patients with COVID-19 by Peter Horby, Wei Shen Lim, et al has received the maximum number of citations with 7,626.