# Pediatric-related post-COVID condition (long COVID) research and its foundational influences: a bibliometric analysis (2020–2025)

## TL;DR

This study maps global research on long COVID in children from 2020 to 2025, showing gaps in pediatric-specific evidence and definitions.

## Contribution

The paper provides a bibliometric analysis of pediatric-focused post-COVID research, highlighting citation patterns and thematic trends.

## Key findings

- The U.S. led in research productivity with 20.9% of publications on pediatric long COVID.
- Foundational long COVID literature heavily influences pediatric-focused citations.
- Symptom-focused research dominates, while MIS-C and cognitive impairment are less studied.

## Abstract

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.

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.

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.

The findings describe the pediatric-term–indexed PCC research landscape and highlight substantial gaps in pediatric-specific evidence, definitions, and longitudinal data.