Visualizing Zika Virus Research Literature Through Bibliometric Mapping

Review Of Literature

Bibliometric mapping which is performed using available bibliographic information deposited at major journals and bibliographic databases helps to understand the existing scientific knowledge about the disease, the level of research and its impact on scientific community at different levels. Scoping reviews apart from bibliometric analysis, also plays a vital role in addressing broad, policy driven research questions by identifying all the relevant evidence concerning the issue and producing summaries of the findings (Levac et al., 2010; Colquhoun et al., 2014). These reviews follow a structured protocol for the identification and characterization of the literature in a manner that is both reproducible and updateable (Young et al., 2014; Colquhoun et al., 2014). The scoping review is also well-suited for the identification of evidence on a broad-topic, but does not include a quality assessment or in-depth data extraction stage that would be required for meta-analysis of studies. However, an important aspect of this review is the identification of where evidence is lacking or non-existent to help direct future research and use of resources (Waddell and Greig, 2016).