MAPPING THE INTELLECTUAL LANDSCAPE OF NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENT AWARENESS: A BIBLIOMETRIC ASSESSMENT OF PRE- AND POST-COVID-19 RESEARCH TRAJECTORIES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69980/yz0c8f67Keywords:
nutritional supplement awareness, bibliometric analysis, COVID-19, knowledge–attitude–practice, science mappingAbstract
Purpose – This study maps how research on nutritional supplement awareness is organised intellectually and how that organisation shifted across the COVID-19 divide. Drawing on Scopus records for 2014–2019 and 2020–2025, it traces growth, leading contributors, collaboration patterns, conceptual structure, and the gaps that should shape future enquiry.
Design/methodology/approach – Following the PRISMA 2020 protocol, 235 peer-reviewed articles were retrieved from Scopus and analysed with Biblioshiny (the bibliometrix interface in RStudio) and VOSviewer. Performance indicators — production, citation, authorship, and country output — were combined with science-mapping techniques (keyword co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling, and thematic mapping) and computed separately for the whole corpus and the two sub-periods.
Findings – Output over 2020–2025 ran 173% higher than in the preceding six years, and the compound annual growth rate rose from 11.8 to 21.5 per cent. Production also became less concentrated in the United States: its share of articles fell from 20.6 to 8.1 per cent as Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Turkey, and Lebanon moved toward the centre. Thematically, descriptive knowledge–attitude–practice surveys gave way to work on health literacy, purchase intention, clinical nutrition, and pandemic-era supplementation; yet bibliographic coupling shows the newer literature building on the older rather than replacing it.
Originality/value – No previous study has treated nutritional supplement awareness as a single, mappable field or measured what the pandemic did to its structure. This analysis supplies that map together with a research agenda grounded in it.
Paper type – Literature review (bibliometric study)
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