Over half a century of research on tick infestation in livestock: a comprehensive bibliometric analysis

Tick infestations and tick-borne diseases in livestock result in substantial economic losses, highlighting the importance of improved tick control strategies. This review assessed global research output on tick infestation in livestock documented in Scopus, co-authorship links with other countries, and identified research gaps based on author keywords co-occurrence analysis. Using the search term "tick infestation*" AND "livestock," 447 scientific articles from 1970 to 4 December 2023 were retrieved and used for co-authorship and co-occurrence analyses in VOSviewer. Authors affiliated with the United States of America, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Kenya had relatively higher total link strengths (45 – 83) and, thus, co-authored more publications than those of other countries (1 – 31). The number of yearly article publications increased from three in 1970 to 28 on 4 December 2023, with a cumulative number of 447. Nonetheless, author keywords such as surveillance, acaricide resistance, distribution, tick control, vaccine, risk factors, and tick-borne diseases occurred less frequently in the articles (5 – 18) with lower link strengths (6 – 41), compared to the occurrences (33 – 71) and link strengths (45 – 128) of the most frequently encountered keywords. These findings highlight the importance of collaborative research in tick infestation in livestock to facilitate its control.