Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Review of Global Coronavirus Research Trends Before COVID-19: Prospects and Implications for COVID-19 Research

Abstract

Coronaviruses (CoV) cause respiratory and intestinal infections. We conducted this bibliometric analysis and systematical review to explore the CoV-related research trends from before COVID-19. We systematically searched the Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid Embase, and Web of Science (WOS) databases for published bibliometric analyses of CoV from database inception to January 24, 2021. The WOS Collection was searched from inception to January 31, 2020, to acquire the CoV-related publications before COVID-19. One-Way ANOVA and Bonferroni multiple-comparison tests were used to compare differences. Visualization mapping and keyword cluster graphs were made to illustrate the research topics and hotpots. We included 14,141 CoV-related publications for the bibliometric analysis and 16 (12 articles) CoV-related bibliometric analyses for the systematic review. Both the systematic review and bibliometric analysis showed (1) the number of publications showed two steep upward trajectories in 2003–2004 and in 2012–2014; (2) the research hotpots mainly focused on the mechanism, pathology, epidemiology, clinical diagnosis, and treatment of the coronavirus in MERS-CoV and SARS-Cov; (3) the USA, and China; the University of Hong Kong; and Yuen KY, came from the University of Hong Kong contributed most; (4) the Journal of Virology had the largest number of CoV related studies. More studies should focus on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment in the future.

A Bibliometric Analysis of the International Dental Journal (2011-2020)

“…This is in accordance with other previous publications that report that the US and Brazil are amongst the most productive countries in the domain of dentistry, either in general or in relation to a more current topic such as COVID-19. 10 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 It should be noted that, in our results, China had lower productivity than the US, which concurs with a previous bibliometric study that reports that China has lower productivity than countries such as the US or Brazil. 15 This situation is peculiar since in recent years most scientific publications worldwide have focused on COVID-19, and China leads the research on the latter topic.…”

“…This is consistent with another bibliometric analysis of coronavirus publications before the COVID-19 pandemic where this institution was amongst the top in productivity. 11 , 12 In the field of dentistry, this institution leads in scientific publications related to the use of silver diamine fluoride. 13 …”

Global research trends in extracellular vesicles based on stem cells from 1991 to 2021: A bibliometric and visualized study

“…All publications originating from Web of Science (WoS), including Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Science, Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science and humanities, Emerging Sources Citation Index, Current Chemical Reactions and Index Chemicus, which contains more than 12,000 international academic journals, is one of the most comprehensive and authoritative database platforms to obtain global academic information ( Wu et al, 2021a ), were analyzed using bibliometric analysis according to previous studies ( Liao et al, 2021b ; Wu et al, 2021b ; Liu et al, 2021 ; Yan et al, 2021 ).…”

Global bibliometric analysis of conceptual metaphor research over the recent two decades

“…Today, the bibliometric tool is increasingly utilized in numerous fields. An amount of research has been conducted (Ellegaard and Wallin, 2015;Donthu et al, 2021;Efron et al, 2021), including tsunami research (Chiu and Ho, 2007;Jain et al, 2021), the circular economy (Geissdoerfer et al, 2017;Bui et al, 2020;Luis and Celma, 2020;Alnajem et al, 2021), green supply chain management (Fahimnia et al, 2015;Amirbagheri et al, 2019), deep learning for healthcare applications (Faust et al, 2018;Saheb et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2021), environmental hypothesis (Sarkodie and Strezov, 2019;Bashir et al, 2021;Hashemi et al, 2022), and COVID-19 research (Verma and Gustafsson, 2020;Yan et al, 2021). Waltman et al (2010) assert that scholars frequently mix mapping and clustering techniques when analyzing bibliometric networks.…”