Bibliometric Analysis on Tuberculosis and Tuberculosis-Related Research Trends in Africa: A Decade-Long Study

Tuberculosis is one of the oldest known diseases and the leading communicable cause of deaths worldwide. Although several studies have been carried out on tuberculosis, no research has examined the publication trends in this area. Hence, this study aimed to fill the gap by conducting a bibliometric study in publications trends on tuberculosis and tuberculosis-related studies in Africa from 2010–2019 and explore the hotspots. Information in published documents on tuberculosis and its related studies from 2010 to 2019 were retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database. The bibliometric tool biblioshiny and Microsoft Excel 2016 were used to analyse the top leading journals, top cited documents, authors’ country production, country collaboration networks, most relevant authors, authors’ impacts, most relevant authors by corresponding author, most cited countries, university collaborations, most relevant affiliations, conceptual structural maps, title word co-occurrence networks, collaboration and significance of individual sources, university, country and keyword relations. A total of 3945 published documents were retrieved. The analyses showed that European Respiratory Journal was the leading journal in publications on tuberculosis studies with a total of 452 published articles, the WHO 2012 report was the most cited document with 2485 total citations while South Africa was the most productive country in tuberculosis publications as well as the leading country with the highest co-authorship collaboration. Analysis of top relevant authors revealed that Anonymous (133) and Dheda (44) were the two topmost relevant authors of tuberculosis publications, South Africa was the most relevant country by corresponding authors and the topmost cited country for tuberculosis publications. Furthermore, analysis of the university collaborations network showed that the University of Cape Town was the topmost university in Africa with the highest collaboration network, tuberculosis as a word had the highest co-occurrence network while the Three Field Plot diagram revealed the relations between universities, keywords and countries. This study provides a quantitative and qualitative analyses of the leading journals, most cited published articles, title word occurrences, and most relevant authors in published documents on tuberculosis and tuberculosis related studies from 2010–2019.