Introduction:
As a global pandemic, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to a growing number of related research studies being published worldwide. However, there is no study on the bibliometric analysis of these Moroccan studies. This study aims to provide a general overview of COVID-19 studies in Morocco and may provide a direction for hot topics and future research trends.
Method:
The global literature about COVID-19 published between 2019 and 2022 was scanned in PubMed, the Web of Science collection database, Scopus, and two preprint platforms. ‘COVID-19’, ‘Novel Coronavirus’, ‘2019-nCoV’, and ‘SARS-CoV-2’ were used as the keywords to reach the relevant publications. The VOS viewer was applied to perform the bibliometric analysis of these articles.
Results:
A total of 987 Moroccan publications on the topic of COVID-19 were retrieved. Of all these publications, 166 (61.9%) were original journal articles, 10 (3.7%) were review articles, 514 (8.38%) were letters and 56 (20.9%) were others, such as case reports, notes, or book chapters. Ten original articles (3.7%) had not yet been peer-reviewed and were retrieved from the preprint servers medRxiv and bioRxiv. The highest number of COVID-19 publications was published by Mohammed V University in Rabat (n=45, 16.8%), followed by Hassan II University (n=32, 11.9%) and Mohammed VI University of Health Sciences (n=29, 10.8%). The open-access format was the predominant publishing model (43.2%) and 92.9% were written in English. The main research lines identified in COVID-19 for Morocco are related to the pandemic’s indirect effects: education (11.2%), mental health (6.3%), and the environment (6.3%).
Conclusion:
Moroccan institutions have made a profound contribution to COVID-19 research than that in other African countries, but lags behind compared to that in Arabic countries.
Keywords: bibliometrics, Covid-19, morocco
Introduction
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a major public health problem, which turned into a pandemic in record time on 11 March 20201. This crisis has created a severe challenge for all countries to properly respond to it. Two years later, as of 15 May 2022 COVID-19 continues to impact the daily lives of all, and has affected 517 millions of people worldwide with more than 6 million recorded deaths2.
In Morocco, the first case was detected in a Moroccan returning from Italy. A few days later, new positive cases were notified, followed by deaths. The government decide to adopt early drastic measures to contain the spread of the epidemic. These measures have included the organization of the operation to return Moroccans from Wuhan, the closure of many public spaces and public domain facilities, and constraining mobility with a curfew. On 20 March 2020, the state of health emergency began according to Legislative Decree No.2.20.293 with confinement and the insistence to respect the rules of hygiene and health security as the preventive measures3.
As a result, researchers from all countries have mobilized massively and published an impressive number of articles to support public health decision-making4. Output of scientific research was rapidly published in the well-known scientific databases like PubMed or Scopus, with the additional advantage of free accessibility for all and without publication fees. To disseminate knowledge earlier, scientist used preprint servers like MedRxiv and BioRxiv to publish their manuscript before they were peer-reviewed5,6. As of 18 May 2022 a total of 258.615 published articles on COVID-19 were included in PubMed7 and 23.460 preprints on COVID-19 were included in MedRxiv and BioRxiv8.
Analyzing research output and the factors that led to highly influential publications has become a priority in the field of COVID-19. Bibliometric analysis, which is a quantitative statistical method, can be used to help us describe the literature on the COVID-19 pandemic. It could analyze the quality of the studies, such as important documents and co-citation networks, and predict the direction of future studies9–11. The majority of COVID-19 bibliometric reports analyzed the research performance of international studies published mostly in countries such as China, Europe, and the United States. While in Africa, a single bibliometric study has been done between 2019 and 2021, and found that some African researchers, especially from South Africa, have played a lead role in publishing COVID-19 research from the continent12. Morocco came ninth in their ranking with a total of 90 publications on COVID-1912. Some published bibliometric studies13–15 were restricted to biomedical research areas. However, to our knowledge, no bibliometrics have been performed to quantify all Moroccan publications existing on COVID-19 and indexed in databases or preprint platforms.
Therefore, the purpose of this bibliometric analysis was to assess for the first time, the Moroccan scientific research productivity related to COVID-19 pandemic published in indexed databases and preprint servers during the last two years, to provide a broad understanding of COVID-19 and future research directions in Morocco.
Methods
Search strategy
A COVID-19-related literature search was conducted between 15 December 2019 and 15 February 2022. Published papers were searched in the following databases: PubMed/Medline, Scopus (Elsevier®), and Web of Science (WoS) (Clarivate Analytics). In addition, bioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/ and medRxiv (https://www.medRxiv.org/) preprint platforms were searched for additional publications.
Only articles with a focus on COVID-19 in Morocco and whose first author is a Moroccan researcher were included, regardless of the language of the document. Were excluded articles that were outside the scope and duplicates.
The search strategy used the following combinations of keywords in the title/abstract fields: ‘COVID-19’ OR ‘covid-19’ OR ‘2019-n Cov’ OR ‘SARS-CoV-2’ OR ‘novel coronavirus’ OR ‘covid-19 pandemic’ AND Morocco.
Two reviewers independently performed study selection and data extraction. Selected articles were preliminary checked for eligibility based on their titles and abstracts, and then full text. Differences in opinion were settled by referral to a third review author.
Statistical analysis
A descriptive analysis was conducted using Microsoft Excel. These included titles, year of publication, first author information (affiliation and country), language, collaboration (national or international when at least one author with a foreign affiliation had contributed to the study), and funders, document type, and citation counts (for WoS and Scopus).
We also collected data about journal sources with their statistics indicators that were provided by Journal Citation Reports16: Categories based on discipline areas with Quartile ranking (Q1–Q4), Impact factor (IF2020) that measures journal-level metric, and Journal citation indicator that measures average category normalized citation impact of citable publications by a journal over the recent three years17, and Type of access (Hybrid, Open-access, or subscription).
Furthermore, to determine what the COVID-19 research trends are in Morocco, we classified all the articles into the following 11 categories according to the research objective: Epidemiology (research on COVID-19 epidemiological characteristics, transmission spread, and development of predictive models outbreak), clinical characteristics and outcomes , detection, and diagnosis (clinical, radiological, and biological markers diagnosis of COVID-19), genomic sequencing , therapeutics (treatment and ethnomedicine), vaccines (COVID-19 research related to vaccine production, vaccine hesitancy, campaign of vaccination, immunization errors, and vaccine effectiveness), direct health impacts of pandemic (on patients and health system ), indirect health impacts of pandemic (on mental health, education, socioeconomic, and environment), pandemic response management (research on COVID-19 waste management, on digital health response, on updates strategies and recommendations), knowledge, attitude and practice, and Infection prevention and control .
VOS viewer (version 1.6.18) is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks that we used to analyze the co-occurrence of author keywords. The size of the nodes was determined by the frequency of occurrence. Each node was given a color, with the same color representing the same cluster. The links between nodes indicated the relevance of the elements to each other. Total link strength (TLS) was adopted to quantitatively evaluate the links18.
Results
Number of Moroccan reports on COVID-19
A total of 987 Moroccan publications on the topic of COVID-19 were identified in the five databases between 15 February 2019 and 15 February 2022. Among them, 268 papers were eligible. Most published papers were indexed in PubMed and Scopus (234, 87.4%), followed by 24 (9.0%) indexed in the WoS core database, and 10 (3.7%) were in preprint platforms (Fig. 1).
Figure 1.
Flowchart for study selection.
The eligible papers included 166 (61.9%) original research articles, 26 (9.7%) proceeding papers, 10 (3.7%) review articles, and 56 (20.9%) other forms of publications, including letters, case reports, notes, book chapters, etc. Ten articles (3.7%) had not yet been peer-reviewed and were retrieved from the preprint servers medRxiv and bioRxiv (Fig. 2).
Figure 2.
Type of publications on COVID-19 in the top five universities in Morocco.
Among them, 50.4% (n=135) of the papers were published in 2021, 41.0% (n=110) was done in 2020 and 7.1% was published in 2022 (till 15th February). Most of the publications in the field of COVID-19 has been written in English (92.9%, n=249), followed by French (7.1%, n=19).
Most productive cities and universities
Since 2015, Morocco has been divided into 12 regions. Table 1 shows the majority of Moroccan regions and universities that produced COVID-19 literature. According to the first author’s information, the two most productive regions were Rabat-Sale-Kenitra with 81 articles (30.2%) and Casablanca-Settat with 77 articles (28.7%).
Table 1.
Most influent region and universities on Moroccan’s Covid-19 literature during 2019–2022
| Rank | Region | Total publications (%) | Total citations* | Rank | University, City | Total publications | Total citations* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rabat-Sale-Kenitra | 81 (30.2) | 31 | 1 | Mohammed V, Rabat | 45 | 61 |
| 2 | Casalanca-Settat | 77 (28.7) | 39 | 2 | Hassan II, Casablanca | 32 | 53 |
| 3 | Fez-Meknes | 29 (10.8) | 11 | 3 | Mohamed VI of Health Sciences (UM6SS), Casablanca | 29 | 64 |
| 4 | Marrakesh-Safi | 28 (10.4) | 11 | 4 | Caddy Ayyad, Marrakesh | 24 | 41 |
| 5 | Oriental | 17 (6.3) | 7 | 5 | Ibn Tofail, Kenitra | 20 | 192 |
| 6 | Souss-Massa | 14 (5.2) | 4 | 6 | Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fez | 18 | 47 |
| 7 | Beni Mellal-Khenifra | 13 (4.9) | 6 | 7 | Mohamed First, Oujda | 17 | 22 |
| 8 | Tanger-Tetouan-AL Houceima | 9 (3.4) | 4 | 8 | Ibn Zohr, Agadir | 12 | 14 |
| 9 | Draa-Tafilalt | 0 (0.0) | 0 | 9 | Sultan Moulay Slimane, Beni Mellal | 12 | 46 |
| 10 | Laayoune-Sakia El Hamra | 0 (0.0) | 0 | 10 | Moulay Ismail, Meknes | 9 | 17 |
| 11 | Dakhla-Oued-Ed-Dahab | 0 (0.0) | 0 | 11 | Abdelmalek Saidi, Tangier | 8 | 17 |
| 12 | Guelmim-Oued Noun | 0 (0.0) | 0 | 12 | Chouaib Doukkali, El Jadida | 6 | 1 |
Total citations in Scopus and Web of sciences.
The leading universities in the literature were Mohammed V University in Rabat (45 reports, 16.8%), Hassan II University (32 reports, 11.9%), and Mohammed VI University of Health Sciences (UM6SS) (29 reports, 10.8%) in Casablanca and Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakesh (24 reports, 9.0%) (Table 1). With 20 publications, the University of Ibn Tofail in Kenitra was ranked fifth. One of their publications has been highly cited (192 times).
The leading university in the literature included in PubMed, Scopus, and Wos was Mohammed V University in Rabat (41 reports, 15.9%) and Hassan II University in Casablanca (32 reports, 12.4%) (Table 2).
Table 2.
The top 10 Moroccan’s universities publishing research on COVID-19 during 2019–2022
| Rank | University, City | Number of publications on PubMed, scopus, WoS (n=258) | Rank | University, City | Number of publications on medrxiv, biorxiv (n=10) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mohammed V, Rabat | 41 | 1 | Mohammed V, Rabat | 4 |
| 2 | Hassan II, Casablanca | 32 | 2 | Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fez | 3 |
| 3 | UM6SS, Casablanca | 29 | 3 | Cadi Ayyad, Marrakech | 2 |
| 4 | Cadi Ayyad, Marrakesh | 23 | 4 | Sultan Moulay Slimane, Beni Mellal | 1 |
| 5 | Ibn Tofail, Kenitra | 21 | 5 | Ibn Tofail, Kenitra | 0 |
| 6 | Mohammed First, Oujda | 17 | 6 | Mohammed First, Oujda | 0 |
| 7 | Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fez | 15 | 7 | Ibn Zohr, Agadir | 0 |
| 8 | Ibn Zohr, Agadir | 12 | 8 | Hassan II, Casablanca | 0 |
| 9 | Sultan Moulay Slimane, Beni Mellal | 11 | 9 | UM6SS, Casablanca | 0 |
| 10 | Abdelmalek Saidi, Tangier | 6 | 10 | Abdelmalek Saidi, Tangier | 0 |
The main journals of published Moroccan’s COVID-19 literature
The 267 reports were published in 166 journals. Amongst the top 10 journals shown in Table 3, Pan African Medical Journal published the most number of publications on COVID-19 in Morocco (n=34), followed by Annals of Medicine and Surgery and Microbiology Resource Announcements with, respectively, seven publications.
Table 3.
The top 10 journals that published Moroccan publications on COVID-19 during 2019–2022
| Rank | Journal | Number of publications (%) | Journal IF2020* | Quartile | Publisher | Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pan African Medical Journal | 34 (12.7) | n/a | Q4 | African Fiel Epidemiology Network | Uganda |
| 2 | Annals of Medicine and Surgery | 7 (2.6) | n/a | Q2 | Elsevier | England |
| 3 | Microbiology Resource Announcements | 7 (2.6) | n/a | Q4 | American Society Microbiology | USA |
| 4 | Drug Safety | 4 (1.5) | 5.606 | Q1 | Adis Int Ltd | New Zealand |
| 5 | Data in Brief | 3 (1.1) | n/a | Q2 | Elsevier | Netherlands |
| 6 | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health | 3 (1.1) | 3.390 | Q2 | Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute | Switzerland |
| 7 | Education Research International | 3 (1.1) | 2.509 | Q3 | Hindawi | USA |
| 8 | Journal of Medical and Surgical Research | 3 (1.1) | n/a | Q4 | Medical & Surgical Research Journal groups | Morocco |
| 9 | World Neurosurgery | 3 (1.1) | 2.104 | Q3 | Elsevier | USA |
| 10 | Cureus | 2 (0.8) | n/a | Q3 | Cureus | USA |
The top 10 institutions that published the most publications on COVID-19 in Morocco were shown in Table 4. Mohammed V University in Rabat was the most productive institution in the highest journals IF. It published three reports with an IF greater than 6: two letters to the editor in Lancet Oncology (IF, 2020 = 41.31) and Blood Advances (IF, 2020 = 6.79) and one article in Environmental Research (IF, 2020 = 6.49). Forty-two reports had 2020 IF equal to or greater than 2.
Table 4.
The top 10 journals with a high impact factor that published Moroccan publications on COVID-19 research
| Rank | Institution, Country | Journal | Number of publications | Type of publications | Journal 2020 IF | Category | Quartile | JCI | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mohammed V, Rabat | Lancet Oncology | 1 | Letter to the editors | 41.31 | Oncology - Scie | Q1 | 7.95 | Hybrid |
| 2 | Hassan II, Casablanca | Journal Of Travel Medicine | 1 | Letter to the editors | 8.490 | Multiple | Q1 | 1.33 | Hybrid |
| 3 | Ibn Zohr, Agadir | Science of The Total Environmeent | 3 | Article | 7.963 | Environmental Sciences - SCIE | Q1 | 1.66 | subscription |
| 4 | Ibn Zohr, Agadir | Chemosphere | 1 | Review | 7.086 | Environmental Sciences - SCIE | Q1 | 1.43 | Hybrid |
| 5 | Mohammed V, Rabat | Blood Advances | 1 | Letter to the editors | 6.799 | Hematology - SCIE | Q1 | 1.31 | Hybrid |
| 6 | Mohammed V, Rabat | Environmental Research | 1 | Article | 6.498 | Public, Environmental & Occupational Health - SCIE | Q1 | 1.78 | Hybrid |
| 7 | Caddi Ayyad, Marrakech | Chaos Solitons & Fractals | 2 | Article | 5.944 | Multiple | Q1 | 1.82 | subscription |
| 8 | Mohammed V, Rabat | Drug Safety | 4 | proceeding paper | 5.606 | Multiple | Q1 | 1.24 | Hybrid |
| 9 | Abdelmalek Saidi, Tangier | Marine Pollution Bulletin | 1 | Article | 5.553 | Multiple | Q1 | 1.44 | Hybrid |
| 10 | Mohammed V, Rabat | European Psychiatry | 1 | proceeding paper | 5.361 | Psychiatry - SCIE | Q1 | 1.21 | Open-Access |
Literature research categories of moroccan publications on covid-19
In Table 5, information was given about in which area the Moroccan’s studies on COVID-19 were conducted the most. It was seen that, the top three research areas about COVID-19 in Morocco were indirect impacts associated with the pandemic (30.5%, n=82), especially in education, mental health, and the environment; epidemiology (16%, n=43) and pandemic response management (13.8%, n=37). Eleven percent of these articles (n=30) were about COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines. The least represented research group was knowledge, attitude, and practice (0.2%).
Table 5.
Research categories of Moroccan’s publications on COVID-19
| Number of publications | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Research category | Total (%) | PubMed (n=132) | Scopus (n=102) | WoS (n=24) | medRxiv (n=8) | bioRxiv (n=2) |
| Indirect impacts of pandemic | 82 (30.5) | 23 | 49 | 8 | 2 | 0 |
| Mental health impact | 17 (6.3) | 6 | 7 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| Education impact | 30 (11.2) | 7 | 19 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| Environmental impact | 17 (6.3) | 9 | 7 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Socioeconomic impact | 18 (6.7) | 1 | 16 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Epidemiology | 43 (16.0) | 13 | 24 | 4 | 2 | 0 |
| Pandemic response management | 37 (13.8) | 26 | 8 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Waste management | 3 (1.1) | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Digital health response | 4 (1.5) | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Strategies and Recommendations | 30 (11.2) | 24 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Direct health impact | 21 (7.8) | 17 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Clinical characteristics and Outcomes | 21 (7.8) | 16 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Vaccines | 15 (5.6) | 5 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 0 |
| Vaccine effectiveness | 7 (2.6) | 0 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Vaccine hesitancy | 3 (1.1) | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Error immunization | 5 (1.8) | 2 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Genomic sequencing | 13 (4.9) | 10 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Detection and diagnosis | 12 (4.5) | 9 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Biological | 11 (4.1) | 8 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Radiological | 1 (0.4) | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Therapeutics | 15 (5.2) | 7 | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Treatment | 8 (3.0) | 6 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Ethnomedicine | 6 (2.2) | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Infection Prevention and Control | 8 (3.0) | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Knowledge, attitude and practice | 2 (0.7) | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Bibliometric analysis of the keywords
As a result of the examination of the biometric analysis in terms of the keywords in the COVID-19 publications, provided by the authors of the paper and occurring more than four times in PubMed, Scopus, and the WOS core database, Fig. 3 was obtained. Of the 778 keywords, 32 met the threshold. The keywords that appeared most were: ‘COVID-19’ (occurrences = 116, TLS = 171), ‘morocco’ (occurrences = 50, TLS = 116), ‘sars-cov-2’ (occurrences = 23, TLS = 47), and ‘pandemic’ (occurrences = 14, TLS = 32).
Figure 3.
Bibliometric analysis of author keywords occurrences in COVID-19 Moroccan publications. The size of nodes indicates the frequency of occurrence. The curves between the nodes represent their co-occurrence in the same publication. The shorter the distance between two nodes, the greater the number of co-occurrences of the two keywords.
Discussion
The purpose of this bibliometric study was to summarize and examine the evolution of COVID-19 pandemic on Moroccan scientific output in the last two years. According to our search strategy, the number of Moroccan publications on the topic of COVID-19 had almost reached a three hundred (n=268), which a half were registered in 2021(n=135). It remains remarkably lower than in the rest of the world; especially compared to the Arab countries which registered in 2021, only in WoS, a high number of publications with 6131:2186 in Saudi Arabia (35.65%), followed by 1281 in Egypt (20.78%) and 719 in the United Arab Emirates (11.73%)19. However, the scientific production of the majority of other African countries that published studies on COVID-19 was limited to 1–5 international papers per country15. In Morocco, despite the efforts made, particularly over the past 10 years, academic health research still faces persistent challenges caused by a lack of sufficient scientific infrastructure, a lack of financial and human resources, and difficulty publishing in high impact journals. The crisis scenario has made that worse. In a survey conducted among medical researchers during the pandemic, 40% of respondents reported a suspension of research activities in progress before the onset of the pandemic20.
Of all Moroccan production on the topic of COVID-19, 61.9% were original articles, 26 (9.7%), proceeding papers, 10 (3.7%) review articles, and 56 (20.9%) were other types such as editorials or notes. These findings tend to be compatible with other health research systems in the Arab world with the majority of research articles (65%), followed by reviews (16%)10. The preprint articles included in the analysis were rare (3.7%). The English language remained the language of science in COVID-19 field with more than 92% of retrieved documents written in English, which joins the literature21. The open-access format was the predominant publishing model (n=72, 43.23%), probably due to the flexibility of the publishers at the time of the COVID-1922.
Moroccan universities are absent from the ‘Shanghai ranking’ of the 1.000 best universities in the world, while 42 universities in the Gulf and the Middle East are ranked between 96 and 143. It was dominated by Saudi Arabia, whose King Abdulaziz and King Saud Universities rank between 101e and 150e, which has seven universities in the world ranking. Egypt’s Cairo University came in second. In Africa, South Africa is the best performer with nine institutions ranked with the University of Cape Town leading the way (201–300). The explanation would be the low means granted to our universities. Indeed, Morocco devotes only 0.75% of its GDP to scientific research23,24. Mohammed V University of Rabat came in first place among Moroccan universities. It was ranked 1201 in QS World University Rankings 202225. In April 2022, the Center for World University Rankings ranked it as the best in Maghreb26. Even during the pandemic, the region of Rabat-Sale-Kenitra ranked first in productivity, with 81 articles (30.2%) including three reports with an IF greater than 6. But the contribution by the region of Casablanca-Settat was also prominent with 77 articles (28.7%).
Pan African Medical Journal was the most preferred journal for publishing documents (Quartile 4) with 34 publications, while it ranks second in the Arab countries with 64 publications in 202110. The original article was published by Otmani et al.27 in The Science of The Total Environment, which is affiliated to University Ibn Tofail of Kenitra was the most cited (n=192). It concluded that severe restrictions on industrial activity and human movement during the COVID-19 pandemic, led to a huge decrease in emissions from vehicles and industrial operations.
The analysis of the co-authorship pattern shows that only seven of them have over five publications. The keywords that appeared most were: ‘COVID-19’ (occurrences = 116) and ‘morocco’ (occurrences =50).
The main research lines identified in COVID-19 from the Arab world are related to public health, epidemiology, immunological, and virus detection10. While, the Moroccan publications essentially concerned impacts associated with the pandemic in education (11.2%), mental health (6.3%), and the environment (6.3%). COVID-19 has sparked or amplified much more serious mental health problems, including among health care workers28. It also has been disrupting education systems around the world, particularly affecting the most vulnerable learners29,30. Apart from the vaccination data, no data on the results of the clinical trials in which Morocco has participated has yet been made available because conducting randomized trials is a time-consuming process and publishing results may take several weeks to months. African countries published a very small proportion of clinical research (0.6%)15. The prevention and control of COVID-19 remains the most important issue at present, and drug therapy remains the weak point in the response to COVID-19 in Arabs and Moroccan countries.
To the best of our knowledge, this study was the first to perform a bibliometric analysis of the documentary records of COVID-19-related research during the 2 years of the pandemic by using VOS viewer to assess the current hot topics of Morocco world research based on COVID-19. Three databases and preprint platforms are consulted, unlike the other bibliometric studies that were focused on a single base. The present bibliometric analysis has some limitations21. We did not use other databases like Google Scholar, because it does not seem to be a great tool for bibliometric applications to judge the relevance of researchers or journals31. Also, we did not explore the roles of the other authors.
In conclusion, COVID-19 research in Morocco is better than that in other African countries, but lags behind compared to that in Arabic countries. However, there is a need for continuous efforts to improve research outputs on the topic in future studies.
Ethical approval
None.
Consent
None.
Sources of funding
None.
Author contribution
All the authors contributed equally to this paper and approved it for publication.
Conflicts of interest disclosure
None.
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Guarantor
S.Z.
Provenance and peer review
Not commissioned, externally peer-reviewed.
Footnotes
Sponsorships or competing interests that may be relevant to content are disclosed at the end of this article
Published online 8 May 2023
Contributor Information
Sofia Zoukal, Email: sofi.cap@gmail.com.
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