Bibliometric analysis on the evolution of knowledge structure of African swine fever

Abstract

Since African swine fever (ASF) spread to East Asia, a fatal crisis has occurred in the global pig industry, because Asia is dominant in pig production. Although some studies conducted bibliomet-ric analysis on ASF, few studies compared research networks, and identified subthemes by major keywords. To fill this gap, this study identified the knowledge structure network of the research, its influence, and core research themes by utilizing the bibliometric analysis of 337 ASF-related journal articles over 50 years from 1970 to 2020 on the Web of Science. The result indicated that papers are mainly published in the fields of veterinary science, virology, microbiology, infectious disease and ap-plied microbiology, and in particular, the fields of veterinary science and virology showed unrivaled weights as they account for 73.40%. With regard to cooperative relationships, European countries such as the UK, Germany, Italy, and Denmark, centered on Spain, are actively contributing to the ASF research. China, France, Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea are leading research co-operation, centering on the United States. In the early stage of the studies, major keywords appeared to be related to outbreaks, quarantine and diagnosis, and in the middle stage, the keywords were expanded to a wide range of pig diseases. Recently, the keywords are becoming more diverse towards antibodies, cross-border transmission and disease monitoring. Based on data on major keywords re-lated to ASF, this study proposed discussions and implications for activating ASF research including genotype, protein, vaccine, diagnosis, defense against infection and epidemiological investigation.