Bibliometric analysis is important to guide future research priorities. We aimed to evaluate the most relevant scientific research on COVID-19 and older adults, analyze the current hot topics and identify the 50 most cited publications.
Articles published between December 2019-March 17, 2021 were analyzed. A list was obtained that contained the terms “COVID-19” or “Novel Coronavirus” or “SARS-CoV-2” or “2019-nCoV” and “geriatrics” or “older adults” or “elderly” in the title, abstract, keywords, or keywords plus. Original research articles, reviews, editorial materials, letters were included. The information for the articles contained the year, journal, title, author, country, affiliation, keywords, document type, and counts of citation. VOSviewer was used to analyze the keywords. The most cited 50 articles were identified.
Totally 784 publications were included. The keywords that appeared most were “COVID-19” and “older adults,” which had a strong link to “social isolation,” “dementia,” “mortality,” and “loneliness.” The most active (40.8%) and most cited (1,578) country was the United States. The journal with the largest number of publications (22.7%) and citations (947) was the Journal of the American Geriatric Society. The most researched (84.0%) and most cited area was geriatrics-gerontology (2,882). The median number of citations for the most cited 50 articles was 46.8.
The current bibliometric analysis provides information about the quality and research areas of the studies concerning COVID-19 and older adults that have been published so far. Social and psychological support, nutrition, vaccines, and telemedicine may be hot research topics for the future.

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