*4.2. Limitations and Future Work*

This present study has several potential limitations, which might encourage further research efforts. These include the research output of the target field being only represented by the publications in a single database. Bias could arise in terms of an underestimation or unbalanced estimation of each subfield. However, PubMed, as used in this study, is a world-renowned authoritative bibliographic database for biomedicine, from which the relevant literature could represent the research status on climate-related infectious diseases well, to certain degree. The second potential limitation is that as climate change and infectious diseases are closely related to national security and defense, due to their direct or indirect military applications, it is possible that part of the publications were not open to the public research community, thus they could not be included in the present bibliometric study for analysis. However, based on the open publications, the tendency and hotspots in the field can still be drawn. We plan to utilize diverse databases for further analyses in future studies.
