Coronavirus: An insight into global research until outbreak of COVID-19 and its implications for the future

Abstract

Background The currently prevailing global threat of COVID-19 caused the publication numbers on coronaviruses to explode. The awareness of the scientific and public community is enormous. But what about the sense of all these undertakings and what can be learned about the future for a better understanding? These questions were answered with established bibliometric analyses of the time until the avalanche of publications unfolded. Methods Chronological, geographical aspects of publication output on coronavirus were also evaluated under the influence of epidemiological and socio-economic parameters. Results The trend in publication and citation numbers shows the strong influence of the past pandemics SARS and MERS with an untypical decline afterward. Research is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary over time. The USA and China, as the countries with the highest number of publications, are being displaced by other countries in the consideration of socio-economic and epidemiological aspects, which shows the effect of regional interest in corona research. A significant correlation was found between the number of SARS cases per country and related publications, while no correlation was found for MERS cases and articles. Conclusions The results underline the need for sustainable and forward-looking approaches that should not end with the containment of COVID-19.

The Pandemic Year 2020: World Map of Coronavirus Research

“…Looking at the overall evolution of CoV research, the year 2020 was exorbitantly outstanding ( Figure 2 ). The epidemics of SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012 caused the number of articles to increase to 679 in 2004 and to 340 in 2016, which decreased as soon as the epidemics were contained [ 4 ]. These figures show that the number of articles on CoV in 2020 was almost 50 times higher than in the previous peak year of 2004.…”

“… Development of the numbers of articles about coronavirus research. The comparative figures from 1970-2019 are taken from a previous study by Klingelhöfer et al [ 4 ] to show the immense increase in publication numbers in 2020. MERS: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome; SARS: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.…”

“…Nevertheless, this extremely rapid publication activity, albeit at a much lower level, could also be demonstrated for the SARS and MERS epidemics, with a notable loss of research effort once the threat had subsided [ 4 ]. Had this not occurred, the state of knowledge at the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak would certainly have been sounder and the resulting measures better scientifically validated.…”

“…Indeed, it was expected that the number of publications on CoV would increase sharply in 2020, but to what extent and with what participation were not clear [ 4 ]. There already have been some studies on the general output of COVID-19–related publications [ 5 - 7 ].…”

“Rehabilitation Research Framework for Patients With COVID-19” Defined by Cochrane Rehabilitation and the World Health Organization Rehabilitation Programme

“…The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in surge of research as the world sought to understand the disease and its prevention and treatment (1,2). The vast scale of the emergency and its immense health, social and economic accelerated research to an unprecedented pace (3); the availability of COVID-19 evidence expanded from observational studies in the early phases of the pandemic to clinical trials and systematic reviews in a matter of months (4). However, the field of rehabilitation, which is highly relevant to the care of patients with COVID-19, has lagged behind during the emergency (5).…”