Bibliometric Analysis on COVID-19: A Comparison of Research Between English and Chinese Studies

Abstract

Background: As an emerging infectious disease, COVID-19 has garnered great research interest. We aimed to explore the differences between English language and Chinese language Medical/Scientific journals publications, particularly aiming to explore the efficacy/contents of the literature published in English and Chinese in relation to the outcomes of management and characterization of COVID-19 during the early stage of COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Publications on COVID-19 research were retrieved from both English and Chinese databases. Bibliometric analyses were performed using VOSviewer 1.6.14, and CiteSpace V software. Network maps were generated to evaluate the collaborations between different authors, countries/provinces, and institutions. Results: A total of 143 English and 721 Chinese original research articles and reviews on COVID-19 were included in our study. Most of the authors and institutions of the papers were from China before March 1st, 2020, however, the distribution of authors and institutions were mainly in developed countries or more wealthy areas of China. The range of the keywords in English publications was more extensive than those in Chinese. Traditional Chinese Medicine was seen more frequently in Chinese papers than in English. Of the 143 articles published in English, 54 articles were published by Chinese authors only and 21 articles were published jointly by Chinese and other overseas authors. Conclusions: The publications in English have enabled medical practitioners and scientists to share/exchange information, while on the other hand, the publications in the Chinese language have provided complementary educational approaches for the local medical practitioners to understand the essential and key information to manage COVID-19 in the relatively remote regions of China, for the general population with a general level of education.

COVID-19 vaccine research focusses on safety, efficacy, immunoinformatics, and vaccine production and delivery: a bibliometric analysis based on VOSviewer

“…and there are still new cases of COVID-19 in China (18). The most urgent task for medical doctors or scientists is to control COVID-19, including the development of a safe and effective vaccine.…”

“…A large number of studies have applied bibliometric analyses to identify research trends in various fields (14). There are a few published studies about COVID-19 using bibliometric analysis to explore the activity and trends (18)(19)(20). However, no bibliometric study on recent scientific output and future research trends of COVID-19 vaccine was reported.…”

Coronavirus disease-19 in environmental fields: a bibliometric and visualization mapping analysis

“…In relation to COVID-19, different bibliometric studies have been conducted at global level considering all fields of science (Kambhampati et al 2020;Lou et al 2020;Mao et al 2020;Mohadab et al 2020;Zyoud and Al-Jabi 2020). Other studies were at regional or country level (i.e., in Latin America and India) (Gallegos et al 2020;Raju and Patil 2020), in a specific filed of science (i.e., in the field of business and management) (Verma and Gustafsson 2020), comparison between English and Chinese studies (Fan et al 2020), or in a collection of a specific sources (i.e., nursing sources) (Oh and Kim 2020). The present study is the first of its kind that addressed COVID-19 research activities in the environmental sources.…”

The Epidemiology of COVID-19 in the Gansu and Jinlin Provinces, China

“…Due to the impending Chinese New Year, more than 5 million people traveled from Wuhan for either family reunions and/or holidays (5), contributing to the subsequent outbreak of COVID-19 in every province/region in China within a matter of weeks (6) that evolved into a pandemic within a matter of months (7). In response to the spread of the virus, a strict lockdown was implemented in late January 2020 in China in an attempt to stop person-to-person transmission, including the mandatory use of face masks in public, no public gatherings, and school and factory closures (8). It has been striking to observe that these measures were able to substantially reduce the number of COVID-19 cases to close to zero within a month, i.e., by February 2020 (9).…”