An Evaluation of Childhood Overweight Studies from South Africa: A Bibliometric Review from 2003-2023

Abstract

Overweight/obesity exists as a severe threat to the well-being of children globally, with its prevalence in South Africa steadily increasing in recent years. Childhood obesity/overweight can be linked to several life-threatening ailments and, in some cases, death. The present bibliometric review aimed to quantify and map out scholarly outputs on obesity/overweight research published in South Africa through a bibliometric analysis. Publications on childhood obesity/overweight studies were obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) dataset, making use of a standardized search stratagem. Biblioshiny software was utilized to group and assess organizations' and journals' contributions to the discipline. Rstudio, Microsoft Excel, and Vosviewer tools were employed for network visualization. A sum of 115 documents related to childhood/overweight research were identified from South Africa (2003-2023). The average citation per document was 136.5. The result showed that the yearly increase of research on the subject was 6.71, which is indicative of growth in the number of articles as the year increases. The institutions with the highest number of research in childhood overweight/obesity are the University of Cape Town (n = 40), North-West University (n = 37), Witwatersrand University (n = 37) and University of KwaZulu-Natal (n = 25), while "stunting" was the most decisive trending topic in the research field. The leading authors' keywords are "obesity" (n = 47) and "overweight" (n = 30), while "BMC Public Health" and "International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health" were the leading journal sources for publication in the field. This bibliometric assessment offers an antique overview of advancement in childhood obesity/overweight investigation from South Africa and has emphasized the primary duties carried out by several institutions in combating overweight/obesity conditions amongst children. Furthermore, the bibliometric review projects the necessity for more research on childhood overweight/obesity and strategic intervention programs for result-oriented prevention and control studies.