An Informetric Analysis of Studies on Influenza Vaccines and Vaccination

Influenza is one of highly contagious acute virus diseases that primarily affects respiratory ways. Annual seasonal epidemics afflict approximately 15% population worldwide and lead to 250,000–500,000 deaths each year. That is why studies on influenza vaccines and vaccination that prevent spreading of the virus remain highly important. This paper presents the results of informetric analysis of publications on influenza vaccine development and vaccination against influenza based on Web of Science databases. The authors analyzed scholarly output from 2001 to 2015. We detected annual increase in the number of publications since 2002, but the highest interest to influenza vaccination was observed in 2009–2011 years due to emergence of new H1N1 virus. After 2011 we registered decrease in publication activity although this subject area is still in the focus of researchers. Journal original papers and reviews seem to be the main source of information, while a share of conference papers consistently decreased over the analyzed period. United States is a leader in the number of research with 40% of all papers which account for 55% of all citations. Elsevier’s Vaccine is a primary journal publishing nearly 20% of papers; however, results of influenza vaccine development have also been published in extremely authoritative journals including The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Science, British Medical Journal, Nature Medicine, etc. This also highlights the great importance of studies on the analyzed topic. Thus, the paper represents different aspects and trends in influenza vaccine development in the last 15 years using a broad range of bibliometric approaches including citation analysis, collaboration networks, revealing the most active countries studying influenza vaccine development, the most authoritative journals and funding organizations.