REVIEW article
Front. Pediatr.
Sec. Children and Health
Pediatric-related post-COVID condition (long COVID) research and its foundational influences: A bibliometric analysis (2020-2025)
Provisionally accepted
Natalya Chagay1*
Amin Tamadon1
Svetlana Kim1Arystan Dossimov1Zhamilya Issanguzhina1Gulzhan Tulegenova1Gulmira Kuldeeva1Natalya Puxovikova1
Irina Kim1
Nadiar Maratovich Mussin1Ramazon Safarzoda Sharoffidin2- 1West Kazakhstan Marat Ospanov State Medical University, Aktobe, Kazakhstan
- 2Avicenna Tajik State Medical University, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
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Background. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly influenced healthcare systems worldwide. The long-term consequences of the infection in children, the phenomenon of post-COVID-19 syndrome, have been attracting increasing attention of the scientific community. The present study is a bibliometric analysis of publications addressing post-COVID (long COVID) complications in pediatric population over the period 2020-2025. Methods and materials. The analysis covers 1,292 records retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science (search date: June 2025). Records were retrieved using post-COVID condition/long COVID terminology combined with pediatric-related keywords; therefore, the corpus includes pediatric-focused studies as well as influential general PCC publications indexed with pediatric terms and frequently cited in pediatric research. The search strategy combined post-COVID condition/long COVID terminology with pediatric terms (child/infant/adolescent), applying filters for English language, publication years 2020–2025, and document type (articles and reviews). Data were merged and analyzed in R using bibliometrix/Biblioshiny to describe productivity, collaboration, citations, and thematic structure. Results. The retrieved corpus included 1,292 publications from 84 countries/regions. The United States led productivity with 270 publications (20.9%), followed by the United Kingdom (114; 8.8%) and China (90; 7.0%). The most frequent author keywords included “COVID-19” (n=900) and “long COVID” (n=818). Highly cited items predominantly consisted of general or mixed-age PCC frameworks, indicating that foundational long COVID literature substantially shapes citation patterns within pediatric-tagged publications. Thematic mapping showed symptom-focused clusters as dominant, while MIS-C and cognitive impairment were less prominent in author-keyword frequency and thematic clustering within the retrieved dataset. Conclusion. The findings describe the pediatric-term–indexed PCC research landscape and highlight substantial gaps in pediatric-specific evidence, definitions, and longitudinal data.
Keywords: bibliometric analysis, Children, Long Covid, Pediatric complications, post-COVID syndrome
Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 10 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Chagay, Tamadon, Kim, Dossimov, Issanguzhina, Tulegenova, Kuldeeva, Puxovikova, Kim, Mussin and Sharoffidin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Natalya Chagay
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.