Mapping the situation of research on coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19): a preliminary bibliometric analysis during the early stage of the outbreak

Abstract

Background The novel coronavirus, named as 2019-nCoV or coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has recently appeared in China and has spread worldwide, presenting a health threat to the global community. Therefore, it is important to understand the global scientific output of COVID-19 research during the early stage of the outbreak. Thus, to track the current hotspots, and highlight future directions, we performed a bibliometric analysis to obtain an approximate scenario of COVID-19 to date. Methods Relevant studies to COVID-19 were obtained from the Scopus database during the early stage of the outbreak. We then analysed the data by using well-established bibliometric indices: document type, country, collaboration patterns, affiliation, journal name, and citation patterns. VOSviewer was applied to map and determine hot topics in this field. Results The bibliometric analysis indicated that there were 19,044 publications on Scopus published on COVID-19 during the early stage of the outbreak (December 2019 up until June 19, 2020). Of all these publications, 9140 (48.0%) were articles; 4192 (22.0%) were letters; 1797 (9.4%) were reviews; 1754 (9.2%) were editorials; 1728 (9.1%) were notes; and 433 (2.3%) were others. The USA published the largest number of publications on COVID-19 (4479; 23.4%), followed by China (3310; 17.4%), Italy, (2314; 12.2%), and the UK (1981; 10.4%). British Medical Journal was the most productive. The Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tongji Medical, and Harvard Medical School were the institutions that published the largest number of COVID-19 research. The most prevalent topics of research in COVID-19 include “clinical features studies”, “pathological findings and therapeutic design”, “care facilities preparation and infection control”, and “maternal, perinatal and neonatal outcomes”. Conclusions This bibliometric study may reflect rapidly emerging topics on COVID-19 research, where substantial research activity has already begun extensively during the early stage of the outbreak. The findings reported here shed new light on the major progress in the near future for hot topics on COVID-19 research including clinical features studies, pathological findings and therapeutic design, care facilities preparation and infection control, and maternal, perinatal and neonatal outcomes.

A Bibliometric Analysis of COVID-19 across Science and Social Science Research Landscape

“…They were written by 66,504 different authors, published in different 2,548 journals and together provide a total of 100,683 citations. A major proportion of the documents were articles (41.5%) and letters (26.5%), which is in line with previous bibliometric studies [32,23]. Moreover, the distribution of COVID-19 related documents according to the Scopus hierarchical classification reveals that nearly two-thirds (65.2%) of documents are subject to health sciences, confirming existing claims in COVID-19 research on the lack of knowledge in less-explored subject areas, including life, physical and social sciences & humanities [33].…”

“…So far, the bibliometric approach examining COVID-19 related issues has been applied on different areas. Namely, some authors address a general overview of COVID-19 research (see Sa'ed and Al-Jabi [23]), while some of them consider a comparative approach, for example a comparison of COVID-19 research between English and Chinese studies (see Fan et al [24]) or comparison between gender distribution of authors of medical papers related to the COVID-19 pandemic (see Andersen et al [25]). Moreover, some of the existing bibliometric studies consider only a single country in their analysis (for Indian case see Vasantha Raju and Patil [26]) and some of them are focused on top cited COVID-19 publications (see ElHawary et al [27]).…”

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

“…To compiling the required information and data for the present assessment, all subjects' fields in Scopus database (i.e., physical, health, life, and social sciences) are considered. We benefited from a recent bibliometric work on COVID-19 to consider the required terms and keywords in relation to COVID-19 (Zyoud and Al-Jabi 2020). The keywords and terms that have been included in the search query in titles and abstracts include: COVID 19; 2019 novel coronavirus; coronavirus 2019; coronavirus disease 2019; 2019-novel CoV; 2019 ncov; COVID 2019; COVID19; corona virus 2019; "nCoV-2019; nCoV2019; nCoV 2019; 2019-ncov; COVID-19"; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; and SARS-CoV-2.…”

“…The application of these techniques can be conducted at different scales ranging from micro (i.e., institution levels) to macro (i.e., global levels) (Wallin 2005). They are vastly used in different fields of science to assess frontiers of research activities qualitatively and quantitatively Zheng et al 2017Zheng et al , 2018Zyoud and Al-Jabi 2020;Zyoud and Fuchs-Hanusch 2015.…”

“…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).…”