As of the middle of April 2020, the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has claimed more than 137,000 lives (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html). Because of its extremely fast spreading, the attention of the global scientific community is now focusing on slowing down, containing and finally stopping the spread of this disease. This requires the concerted action of researchers and practitioners of many related fields, raising, as always in such situations the question, of what kind of research has to be conducted, what are the priorities, how has research to be coordinated and who needs to be involved. In other words, what are the characteristics of the response of the global research community on the challenge? In the present paper, we attempt to characterise, quantify and measure the response of academia to international public health emergencies in a comparative bibliometric study of multiple outbreaks. In addition, we provide a preliminary review of the global research effort regarding the defeat of the COVID-19 pandemic. From our analysis of six infectious disease outbreaks since 2000, including COVID-19, we find that academia always responded quickly to public health emergencies with a sharp increase in the number of publications immediately following the declaration of an outbreak by the WHO. In general, countries/regions place emphasis on epidemics in their own region, but Europe and North America are also concerned with outbreaks in other, developed and less developed areas through conducting intensive collaborative research with the core countries/regions of the outbreak, such as in the case of Ebola in Africa. Researches in the fields of virology, infectious diseases and immunology are the most active, and we identified two characteristic patterns in global science distinguishing research in Europe and America that is more focused on public health from that conducted in China and Japan with more emphasis on biomedical research and clinical pharmacy, respectively. Universities contribute slightly less than half to the global research output, and the vast majority of research funding originates from the public sector. Our findings on how academia responds to emergencies could be beneficial to decision-makers in research and health policy in creating and adjusting anti-epidemic/-pandemic strategies.

This study explores the characteristics of scientific activity patterns through co-author affiliations to obtain new insights into interdisciplinary research. To classify the interdisciplinarity in research, we explored and compared two different approaches: the diversity of disciplines reflected in the listed affiliations of the authors and the diversity of the subject categories reflected in the reference list. To assess the diversity in departmental affiliations, we developed an explorative methodology that retrieves feature words from a combination of manual work and the thesaurus function in the Thomson Data Analyzer text mining tool. To assess the diversity in references, we followed the conventional approach applied in previous work. With both approaches, we relied on diversity as the measure for assessing interdisciplinarity of 157,710 articles published in PloS One (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016). Based on a comparison between the results of both approaches, our study confirms that different methodologies and indicators can produce seriously inconsistent, and even contradictory results. In addition, different indicators may capture different understandings of such a multi-faceted concept as interdisciplinarity. Our results are summarized in a schematic representation of this twofold perspective as a method of indexing the different types of interdisciplinarity commonly found in research studies.

The purpose of this project was to examine the emotional health and well-being of Canadian caregivers of persons with significant mental health or addictions problems. We assessed the emotional health of caregivers by care-receiver condition type (i.e. mental health or addictions vs. physical or other health problems), levels of caregiver stress and methods particularly for reducing stress among caregivers of persons with mental health or addictions disorders. Weighted cross-sectional data from the 2012 General Social Survey (Caregiving and Care Receiving) were modelled using weighted descriptive and logistic regression analyses to examine levels of stress and the emotional health and well-being of caregivers by care-receiver condition type. Caregivers of persons with mental health or addictions problems were more likely to report that caregiving was very stressful and that they felt depressed, tired, worried or anxious, overwhelmed; lonely or isolated; short-tempered or irritable; and resentful because of their caregiving responsibilities. The results of this study suggest that mental health and addictions caregivers may experience disparate stressors and require varying services and supports relative to caregivers of persons with physical or other health conditions.

Addressing many of the world’s contemporary challenges requires a multifaceted and integrated approach and, in this respect, interdisciplinary research (IDR) is increasingly recognized as central to both academic interests and national science policies. In spite of the growing attention given to IDR, the impact of IDR remains under-investigated. In this study, we analyzed the influence of interdisciplinarity on citation impact (particularly, WoS citation) and broader impact (particularly, PloS usage) at the article level. We measured IDR in terms of three different elements of diversity—variety, balance, and disparity—as well as the integrated diversity overall. The results of negative binomial regression analysis with field fixed effects and robust standard errors show the positive effects of interdisciplinarity on both academic and broader impact. From an analysis of trends over time, the results show that higher interdisciplinary publications tend to attract more citations and have higher PLoS usage. Compared to citations, which need a more extended period to accumulate, the advantage of measuring impact with PLoS usage is its immediacy. Also, there are signs that PLoS usage and citations can mutually reinforce each other.

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