
At present, COVID-19 vaccines researches have focused on vaccine efficacy, vaccine hesitancy, and the efficacy of current vaccines on omicron variants. The research on COVID-19 vaccine is currently the hottest topic in academic community. Cluster analysis of cited references showed that top eight largest categories were Cov-2 variant, clinical trial, large integrated health system, COV-2 rhesus macaque, mRNA vaccine, vaccination intent, phase II study, and Cov-2 omicron variant ( Q value = 0.672, S value = 0.794). Cluster analysis of keywords showed that the top four categories were protection efficacy, vaccine hesitancy, spike protein, and second vaccine dose ( Q value = 0.535, S value = 0.879). The three most frequent keywords were immunization (centrality = 0.25), influenza vaccination (centrality = 0.21), and coronavirus (centrality = 0.18). The New England of medicine journal dominated with 22 articles in the 32 high-quality journals. Harvard Medical School (centrality = 0.71), Boston Children’s Hospital (centrality = 0.67), and Public Health England (centrality = 0.57) were the top three institutions leading the way on COVID-19 vaccine research. The USA ( n = 56), England ( n = 33), and China ( n = 16) ranked the top three countries/regions in terms of the number of publications. The number of citations ranged from 206 to 5881, with a median of 349.5. CiteSpace (v6.1.R3) was adopted for bibliometric analysis with statistical and visual analysis. The top 100 most cited original articles on COVID-19 vaccine from January 2020 to October 2022 were identified from Web of Science Core Collection database.


This study aimed to uncover the current major topics regarding COVID-19 vaccine, and systematically evaluate the development trends for future research.
