Bibliometric Analysis of COVID-19 in the Context of Migration Health: A Study Protocol

Introduction: Human mobility has been pivotal to the spread of COVID-19 through travel and migration. To mitigate the spread, most countries have imposed strict travel restrictions that have severely affected both the wellbeing and livelihoods of many migrant and mobile populations (both internally and internationally), particularly those from impoverished communities, those affected by humanitarian crises, including populations displaced and/or living in camps and camp-like settings. The need to include migrants (both regular and irregular or undocumented) in national strategic response plans for disease prevention and control has been increasingly recognized. Better understanding of the existing scientific evidence in migration health is crucial in designing effective response measures. In this paper, we present a protocol for a bibliometric analysis of scientific publications on COVID-19 and migration health. Expected study findings aim to provide valuable information to support evidence mapping on COVID-19 and migration health, particularly the identification of important research gaps. Methods and analysis: Using Elseviers Scopus abstract and citation database, a comprehensive search strategy will be applied to map scientific publications on COVID-19 and migration health. The current analysis will focus on research published from 1 January 2020 to 4 May 2020. The search query on migration health will largely focus on migration, migrant and human mobility-related terms. Three reviewers will screen publications for eligibility. The extracted bibliographic information will be analysed to determine the dominant research themes, country coverage and migrant groups. Collaboration networks will be analysed using VosViewer, a network analysis software. A deep dive on dominant research themes or migrant health-related topics will be done by creating visualization network maps of keywords from the retrieved publications.