Select South Asian Countries in Covid-19 Research: A Bibliometric Assessment of their Publications during 2019-21

Background: The global scientific community has been quick to respond to health crisis unleashed by Covid-19 pandemic with intensified investments in R&D and thereby it gave new impetus to Covid-19 research. The world has come to witness unprecedented increase in research publications on control and treatment of Covid-19 pandemic. Like any other region in the world, South Asia too has been the worst-hit region and it too witnessed increase in Covid-related research studies. Systematic reviews of such literature and bibliometric studies are used nowadays as tools to identify and analyze key and significant South Asian contribution to the subject. The present study aims to assess and quantify the contribution and impact of Covid-19 research made by a group of select four South Asian countries. Methods: Publications data on Covid 19 covering the period between December 2019 and 8.7.2021 was sourced from the Scopus database. VOSviewer 1.6.14 software was applied to generate network maps, assess hot topics in the area and describe collaboration patterns in research between different countries. Results: A total of 18,64,275 publications reflecting the global research output on Covid-19 were retrieved from the Scopus database. The publications data of select four South Asian countries - Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka - was also retrieved. Comparatively the data size of select four South Asian countries was small, limited to 4012 documents, and accounting for a 2.15% share of the global research output on Covid-19 virus. Pakistan published the most number of Covid-19 publications (n=2246, 55.58%), followed by Bangladesh (n=1203, 29.99%), Nepal (n=512, 12.76%) and Sri Lanka (n=202, 5.03%). The United States as the collaborating partner in most number of publications contributed by South Asian countries (n=609, 25.41%), followed by the United Kingdom (n=496, 20.69%), China (n=453, 18.90%), Saudi Arabia (n=441, 18.40%) and India (n=426, 17.77%). Covid-19 treatment type was the most studied topic in the contributions made by South Asian countries accounting for a 16.45% share, followed by epidemiology (15.63%), risk factors (5.835), clinical studies (4.81%), etc. Conclusion: This paper finds that the quantity and quality of research pursued by a select group of four South Asian countries in the domain of Covid 19 studies has so far been small and insignificant. There is an urgent need on the part of select group of South Asian counties to improve their productivity and qualitative performance at the national, institutional, and individual author level.