**3. Results**

Table 1 shows an expansion in the volume of publications on QOL among HIV/AIDS populations. The period between 2007 and 2017 saw the number of papers grow from 114 to 234. In particular, the total citation (from the year published up to 2017) has also risen remarkably in 2005 and 2013.


**Table 1.** General indicators of publications

\* Usage: downloaded time; <sup>1</sup> Mean cited rate per year = Total citations/(Total citations × (2018-that year)); <sup>2</sup> Mean usage rate last 6 months = Total usage last 6 months/Total number of papers; <sup>3</sup> Mean use rate last 5 years = total usage last 5 years/(total number of papers × 5).

Table 2 indicates the frequency of countries by counting such study settings in the mentioned abstracts. In the top 10, except countries with the highest HIV prevalence, such as South Africa, the number of studies were mostly produced in upper-middle-income and high-income countries (United States, Brazil, China, Canada, Thailand, England, Australia) [33]. The low and middle-income countries such as Botswana, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland had below 10 papers, even though these countries have been reported as having the highest rate of HIV/AIDS [34].

Figure 1 displays the global network between 102 countries having co-authorships of selected papers. These countries have been classified into 10 clusters of at least five countries, depending on their level of international collaboration.

Cluster 1 (red) refers to the network of countries in the two regions: South-East Asia and the Western Pacific. Cluster 2 (purple) indicates the link of the USA with European countries and Saudi Arabia. Cluster 3 (blue) illustrates international collaborations between the Americas, South Africa, and some countries in Asia. Cluster 4 (brown and green) demonstrates the co-authorship between countries within Southeast Africa. In addition, they have an additional link with England. The European countries tend to associate with each other by geographical areas, such as orange, pink, light blue, and yellow (French West Africa).


**Table 2.** A number of papers by countries as study settings.

**Figure 1.** The network of 102 countries having international co-authorships in quality of life research in HIV/AIDS.

Figure 2 describes the core components of the keywords with the most common groups of terms. There were four major clusters that emerged from 205 most frequent co-occurrence keywords with a minimum frequency of 20 times. Three major clusters (red, blue, and green) indicate three topics of quality of life.

**Figure 2.** The most common author keywords. Note: the principal components of the data structure were visualized regarding the colors of the nodes; the node size was identified by the keywords' occurrences; the closer the nodes are, the stronger the association between two keywords are.

Cluster 1 (red) covers mental health, social, and associated factors. It includes psychological disorders (depression, anxiety, stress); social behavior (stigma, discrimination); specific HIV groups (such as gay, children, women, and men), and regions (India, South Africa, Uganda). Cluster 2 (blue) presents physical health-related aspects: treatment, outcome, mortality, and disability. Cluster 3 (green) indicates ART adherence studies: study design and laboratory results.

The top 50 emerging research domains have been discovered from the content analysis of abstracts using exploratory factor analysis (Table 3). Mental health (62.6% of papers containing mental health-related keywords) appears to receive more attention from researchers compared to other health problems (e.g., chronic conditions 23.4%, or cost-effectiveness 37.5%). Other major domains cover coping strategies and social support. Nearly half of the articles have keywords related to the randomized and controlled trial. Meanwhile, the keywords concern comorbidities account for less than 10%.

Figure 3 illustrates the similarity between QOL and the top 50 co-occurrence terms. In particular, physical, social, and health were the most common terms that co-occurred with QOL in all abstracts. The term related to women was more common than that of men in the literature. Antiretroviral, treatment, and infection were also co-occurrence terms with a high frequency of appearance.


**Table 3.** Top 50 research domains emerged from exploratory factor analysis of all abstracts' contents.

