Background and Objective:
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on many areas of preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic assistance. Some preventive activities may have been neglected in terms of implementation or research. These include the accessibility to HIV screening and the cost-effectiveness of this preventive measure. This study aimed to investigate the attention of the scientific community on the cost-effectiveness of HIV screening through a bibliometric analysis referring to the period 2020-2022. The aim was to evaluate publication and citation related metrics, identify major keywords and topics, and assess geographic distribution of published articles.

Methods:
A list of all publications containing specific keywords and Mesh terms related to HIV screening and its cost-effectiveness in all fields was extracted from Scopus on date 2022/11/23. Bibliometric analysis was then conducted using the bibliometrix and biblioshiny packages on RStudio.

Results:
Total publications (TP) were 155 with an annual growth rate of -7,58%. Contributing authors were 1442, with an average of 2,923 citations per paper. The origin of TP is heterogeneous; 67,1% of them were produced by International co-authorships. The countries with the most conspicuous literary production were the USA, UK, South Africa, China and Switzerland. The United States and South Africa were the countries with the highest number of mutual collaborations. Trending topics about HIV screening cost-effectiveness include “Cost-effectiveness analysis”, “Controlled study” and “Mass screening”.

Conclusions:
The covid 19 pandemic has caused a setback to primary health care and secondary prevention services such as screenings, and related research. The study demonstrates a reduction of scientific production on this topic and the need to focus again both in research and in public health services implementation on other important pandemics that could accelerate their expansion such as HIV.