A Global Bibliometric Analysis of Services for Children Affected by HIV/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: Implications for Impact Mitigation Programs (GAPRESEARCH)

Tremendous progress has been made over the past three decades in the fight against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic; however, children experienced substantial physical and psychosocial effects of HIV infection. To inform services and policy development, we analyzed research growth and current trends in studies on children with HIV/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). A total of 17,598 research papers and reviews in English, which were published on Web of Science, were downloaded. VOSviewer was used to generate an author keyword cooccurrence network and a network illustrating the connection among countries by shared coauthorships. Exploratory factor analysis was employed to identify research domains emerging from the abstracts' contents. The number of papers and their impacts had grown significantly in the past decade. The majority of study settings were in African countries. Research topics related to HIV in children were robust in areas of prevention of mother-to-child transmission and HIV and comorbidities treatments. Although psychosocial and behavioral disorders were recognized in previous studies, the number of interventions in these fields is still limited or not sustained. This study presents the global research trends and interests, points out research gaps of available publications and suggests several implications for services and intervention programs for children infected with HIV/AIDS. While preventions of mother-to-child transmission have been extensively studied, more efforts should be made to fulfill the lack of research on young people who are at risk of being infected or who are already infected with HIV. System thinking approach is needed in the design and implementation of future studies.