Between panic and motivation: did the first wave of COVID-19 affect scientific publishing in Mediterranean countries?

Abstract

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that began in the winter of 2020, all communities and activities globally have been positively or negatively affected. This scientometric study raises an interesting question concerning whether the volume and characteristics of scientific publishing in all disciplines in 23 Mediterranean countries have been impacted by the pandemic and whether variations in the cumulative totals of COVID-19 cases have resulted in significant changes in this context. The Scopus database and SciVal tool supplied the necessary data for the years targeted for comparison (2019 and 2020), and the annual growth rates and differences were computed. The study used the Mann–Whitney test to examine the significance of the differences between the two years and the Spearman and Kendall correlation tests to evaluate the effect of the number of infections on these differences for all aspects of scientific performance. The findings demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic served as a powerful incentive, and the Mediterranean region experienced considerable differences in the volume and features of publications during this crisis. The most substantial implications were the significant growth from 3.1 to 9.4% in productivity and the increases in the annual growth rates of international collaboration, by 12% for the collaboration among Mediterranean countries and 10% for collaboration with the top ten epidemic countries. It was also proven that some characteristics of the publications were positively correlated with the total number of infections. This investigation can help university leaders and decision-makers in higher education and research institutions in these countries make decisions and implement measures to bridge the gaps and motivate researchers in all fields to conduct more research during this ongoing pandemic.

Research Trends in the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Oncology: A Bibliometric and Network Visualization Study

“…It has been reported that the COVID-19 pandemic served as a potent influencer, with countries worldwide experiencing significant variation in the volume and features of scientific publishing during this crisis [105]. To determine whether there were differences in publishing types between the pre-COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world, the annual growth rate (AGR) of reviews and articles was computed using the equation shown below for three periods (2018-2019, 2019-2020, and 2020-2021).…”

A koronavírus-járvány a közgazdasági szakirodalomban. Egy új határterület tudománymetriai elemzése

“…A közgazdaságtan kategóriájához kapcsolódó publikációk 96 százaléka angol nyelven íródott. Erre a jelentős fölényre más szerzők is rámutattak (lásd például Ali [2022], Al-Zaman [2021, da Silva és szerzőtársai [2021]). Az angolon kívül a spanyol (1,66 százalék), az orosz (1,55 százalék), a török (0,28 százalék) és a francia (0,24 százalék) nyelvű publikációk szerepeltek a letöltött adatbázisban, bár ezek aránya már elenyésző volt a fő világnyelvhez viszonyítva.…”