Overview of Family Doctor Services Under Major Public Health Emergencies 2019–2024: A Bibliometric Analysis

Background During the novel coronavirus epidemic, family physicians played a pivotal role in the primary health care system. They provided essential infrastructural support for the implementation of community prevention and control strategies and helped advance the frontline of epidemic containment. Objective This study aims to gather the latest research on the role of family doctors during the COVID‐19 pandemic, analyze publication trends and underlying thematic structures, and thereby provide a comprehensive overview of research hotspots and developments in this field, offering robust support for future scientific inquiry. Methods Data were retrieved from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) databases within the Web of Science Core Collection. The search was limited to articles published between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2024. Tableau was used to analyze institutional distribution, Excel was employed to organize journal distribution data, and VOSviewer was utilized to examine author and keyword distributions. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was applied to identify research topics and thematic clusters, with results visualized and interpreted using pyLDAvis. Results A total of 1206 articles were included in the analysis. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the United Kingdom led in publication output in this research domain, contributing 327 articles. The University of Oxford was the most productive institution, publishing 111 articles. Among journals, BMJ Open published 83 relevant articles, which received 912 citations (excluding self‐citations) and achieved an H‐index of 13. The most prolific author was Mehrkar, A., with 25 publications. Thematic analysis revealed that research largely centered on the management of high‐risk groups and public health responses in primary care. Specifically, the topics “management of high‐risk groups in primary care” and “COVID‐19 prevention and public health response” accounted for 34.7% and 18.3% of the publications during the pandemic, respectively.