The impact of early scientific literature in response to COVID-19: a scientometric perspective

Abstract

Background. In the early phases of a new pandemic, identifying the most relevant evidence and quantifying which studies are shared the most can help researchers and policy makers. The aim of this study is to describe and quantify the impact of early scientific production in response to COVID-19 pandemic.Methods. The study consisted of: 1) review of the scientific literature produced in the first 30 days since the first COVID-19 paper was published; 2) analysis of papers' metrics with the construction of a "Computed-Impact-Score" (CIS) that represents a unifying score over heterogeneous bibliometric indicators. In this study we use metrics and alternative metrics collected into five separate categories. On top of those categories we compute the CIS. Highest CIS papers are further analyzed.Results. 239 papers have been included in the study. The mean of citations, mentions and social media interactions resulted in 1.63, 10 and 1250, respectively. The paper with highest CIS resulted "Clinical features of patients [...]" by Chaolin Huang et al., which rated first also in citations and mentions. This is the first paper describing patients affected by the new disease and reporting data that are clearly of great interest to both the scientific community and the general population.Conclusions. The early response of scientific literature during an epidemic does not follow a preestablished pattern. Being able to monitor how communications spread from the scientific world toward the general population using both traditional and alternative metric measures is essential, especially in the early stages of a pandemic.

Bibliometric analysis of COVID-19 literature

“…Some other relevant bibliometric studies (Chahrour et al, 2020; Chen et al, 2020; DE Felice & Polimeni, 2020; Golinelli et al, 2020; Hamidah et al, 2020; Hossain, 2020; Zhai et al, 2020; Zhou & Chen, 2020) analyzed the similar indices, such as authors, countries, languages, citations, institutions, sources, and types. These studies are affected by at least two problems.…”

“…Meanwhile, several COVID-19-related bibliometric papers added some relevant findings to the international scholarships. While some researches took only the recent publications into account (Golinelli et al, 2020; Lou et al, 2020; Zhai et al, 2020), some researches analyzed publications from a relatively longer span (Tao et al, 2020; Zhou & Chen, 2020). Identifying some knowledge-gaps in the previous literature, this bibliometric analysis presents some novel findings.…”

Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented mobilisation of scholarly efforts prompted by a health crisis: Scientometric comparisons across SARS, MERS and 2019-nCoV literature

“…On December 31, 2019 an official case of a novel respiratory disease of the category of coronaviruses, named Covid-19, was reported in Wuhan, China, marking the beginning of what proved to be one of the direst and most devastating viral outbreaks in the modern history (Sohrabi et al 2020 ; Wang et al 2020 ). This was immediately followed by an unprecedented and swift response of the academic community to address various dimensions of this health crisis and prompted an avalanche of scholarly publications on this topic (Golinelli et al 2020 ; Haghani et al 2020 ; Kagan et al 2020 ). In less than five months, more than 12,000 publications on this topic have already been indexed by Scopus with the number increasing figuratively every day in considerable increments 1 (Torres-Salinas et al 2020 ).…”

Systematic review of bibliometric studies on SARS-CoV-2

“…The retrieved documents on bibliometrics studies about SARS-CoV-2 showed a significant variation in their results, ranging from 153 to 21,395 articles with an average of 4,279 (± 5,510), although it was possible to observe some similarities. Golinelli 35 and Gori, Boetto and Fantini 34 , aimed to measure what had been published in the first 30 days of the epidemic outbreak. Both studies used the PubMed platform and the same keywords combination as search terms, obtaining very similar results: 239 and 234 retrieved articles, respectively.…”