1. Introduction
Avian leukosis viruses (ALVs) are important veterinary viruses economically and medically and are classified based on sequence similarities. These belong to the alpharetrovirus genus of the subfamily orthoretrovirinae in Retroviridae [
1,
2,
3]. Based on their endogenization and transmission mode, ALVs are categorized into endogenous and exogenous avian retroviruses. All oncogenic ALVs fall into the exogenous category of ALV [
3] and are causative of severe commercial losses in the poultry industry [
4,
5]. In chicken, the exogenous ALVs include subgroups A, B, C, D, J, and K, while subgroup E belongs to endogenous ALV [
1,
5,
6,
7]. The research on avian retroviruses is not new in the scientific world, as it dates back more than a century [
4,
8,
9], and still, scientists are exploring its enigma. Until now, no effective vaccine has been available for ALV infection [
10].
Bibliometric studies pave our understanding to determine the scientific impact and research trends. Several indices (indexes), including co-occurrence, citations, and keywords, are widely used in scientometrics to highlight research productivity, collaboration networks, and trends. Scientists use different algorithms and methods to decipher broad dimensions of bibliometric studies [
11,
12,
13]. The bibliometric metadata of scientific publications has been mathematically used for the quantitive analysis of a specific topic’s yearly or total research publications. This method helps to determine the quality of studies, analyze the main areas of research, and also helps to predict future research directions [
14]. The network science and bibliometric studies combine to make research more interactive, allowing users to visualize worldwide scientific activity and create maps—the current study utilized bibliometric and networking tools to decipher the ALV research. Our aim was to find out research trends and themes, the influential journals, authors, countries, institutions, and worldwide collaborative networking of countries on the ALV research. According to scientific data, there are limited bibliometric studies on ALV research.
Furthermore, the co-author network analysis helps to explore and quantify research and development collaboration among authors, institutes, and countries [
15]. In these graphical visualizations of the co-author network, the authors are nodes interconnected through co-authored scientific publications, which are the edges between these nodes. The level of betweenness density of each author node specifies their connectivity [
14].
4. Discussion
Recently, bibliometric investigations have been utilized more to analyze the scientific research trends and progress in numerous scientific and research domains. The current data analysis represents different dimensions of ALV research, including the leading countries, organizations, and sources/journals producing the literature on ALV. Of these countries, the USA is the leading country in ALV research, closely followed by China. However, during the last decade, China has appeared as the new scientific hub for ALV research. This puts a significant responsibility on Chinese policymakers and researchers to fund more meaningful and citable research [
21]. The current findings align with the findings of Al-Jabi and Farooq [
22,
23], indicating English as the de-facto language, which is also in line with Wiethoelter, Morel, and Yi [
24,
25,
26].
The data analysis regarding authorship and collaborative research patterns reveals that most publications have collaboration ties of authors [
15,
25,
27]. This collaborative network is also essential for health innovation due to its application in interdisciplinary research [
19]. The authors from China were the most significant contributors to the topic, which does not coincide with Albuquerque and others [
28,
29], where US researchers were the most frequent contributors to the studies conducted on Zika. Moreover, the articles from the USA were the most cited, followed by China. Shandong Agricultural University was the most cited institution, followed by South China Agricultural University [
30]. Considering the country-wise organizations contributing to the theme, it is not astounding that Chinese institutes ranked on top in the ten lading organizations list, followed by the USA organizations. The bibliometric dataset unveiled the most productive journal on ALV research. According to our findings, the
Journal of Virology has published more on the ALV topic. The present results coincide with the previous study of Zaib et al. [
11], where the
Journal of Virology appeared as the most influential journal. These findings contradict the results of Koo [
31], who reported that the
Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine contributed the greatest number of articles on aroma therapy. These findings are also not in line with the study conducted on Campylobacter [
32]. The country-collaboration map centering a significant count of the literature published as the result of positive collaborative research between countries, such as the USA and China, agrees with Hossain’s bibliometric work [
32]. The USA actively participated in collaborative research with the UK and Canada, which matches the previous study [
23].
Early studies mainly concentrated on the diagnosis, signs, and subtypes of ALV, but later they prioritized ALV-J more due to the economic losses in the poultry industry. There is inadequate data available for the treatment and vaccine development against ALV infection among poultry flocks. Hence, scientists started to study the immune response, replication, and innate immunity to curb the infection in the host.
The current study has some limitations, such as avian leukosis virus research data collection being limited to the WOS (Core Collection) publication index, whereas other databases such as PubMed, EMBASE, Google Scholar, Dimension, and Scopus were not included. Moreover, gender analysis was not performed to study females’ global contribution to the ALV research. Future work in these domains may provide a thorough comparative and cumulative aspect of the ALV literature available on these databases.
5. Conclusions
Bibliometric analyses are now being undertaken in a variety of scientific domains, but the current study is believed to be the foremost for ALV research. In short, the bibliometric analyses were carried out to better understand and quantify the global research productivity for ALV. China and the United States appear to collaborate with one another, and the rest of the globe, the most, and have the highest research productivities. Regarding publishing output, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), South China Agricultural University, and Shandong Agricultural University hold the top three spots among research institutions. Moreover, the analysis highlighted that “endogenous retrovirus”, “immune response”, “innate immunity”, and “replication” emerged as the dominant research trends and themes. The preferable journals for publication are the Journal of Virology and Avian Diseases. In general, the current study provides a comprehensive overview of the global ALV research perspective, and therefore can serve as the basis for future research in this field.