A Century of Mathematical Epidemiology: A Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization of Research Trends
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Defined as the application of mathematical models and methods for the study of disease spread and control, Mathematical epidemiology has now emerged as a very important area for understanding public health dynamics. The paper presents an overall bibliometric analysis of research in mathematical epidemiology using the Scopus database. This overview comprises 1,787 documents: journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers from 819 sources. From 1916 to 2024, it has been possible to identify key trends, influential authors, and central themes through the application of the PRISMA methodology. The results reflect that since 2000, there has been a significant growth in research production; most of it was during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also determined trends in international collaboration, leading funding sponsors, and the dynamics underlying major research topics. According to this study, the role of mathematical models in epidemiology is becoming increasingly prominent, driven by the need to address complex global health challenges and an expanding influence on public health strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Bibliometrics Domain: not available · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | Bibliometrics Domain: not available · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Other design | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.102 | 0.172 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.923 | 0.979 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".