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

Abstract

During the current century, each major coronavirus outbreak has triggered a quick and immediate surge of academic publications on its respective topic. The spike in research publications following the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak, however, has been like no other. The global crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has mobilised scientific efforts at an unprecedented scale. In less than 5 months, more than 12,000 research items and in less than seven months, more than 30,000 items were indexed, while it is projected that the number could exceed 80,000 by the end of 2020, should the current trend continues. With the health crisis affecting all aspects of life, research on Covid-19 seems to have become a focal point of interest across many academic disciplines. Here, scientometric aspects of the Covid-19 literature are analysed and contrasted with those of the two previous major coronavirus diseases, i.e., Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The focus is on the co-occurrence of key-terms, bibliographic coupling and citation relations of journals and collaborations between countries. Interesting recurring patterns across all three literatures were discovered. All three outbreaks have commonly generated three distinct cohorts of studies: (i) studies linked to public health response and epidemic control, (ii) studies on chemical constitution of the virus; and (iii) studies related to treatment, vaccine and clinical care. While studies affiliated with category (i) seem to have been relatively earliest to emerge, they have overall received relatively smaller number of citations compared to publications the two other categories. Covid-19 studies seem to have been disseminated across a broader variety of journals and across a more diverse range of subject areas. Clear links are observed between the geographical origins of each outbreak as well as the local geographical severity of each outbreak and the magnitude of research originated from regions. Covid-19 studies also display the involvement of authors from a broader variety of countries compared to SARS and MERS. Considering the speed at which the Covid-19-related literature is accumulating, an interesting dimension that warrants further exploration could be to assess if the quality and rigour of these publications have been affected.

Visualizing the knowledge outburst in global research on COVID-19

“…Their study was intended to provide information about the pathogen as a whole (but not limited to the new coronavirus) keeping in view to map the previous research in this field. Haghani and Bliemer ( 2020 ) pursued a scientometric comparison across the literature on SARS, MARS, and nCoV-2. Their study focused on the co-occurrence of keywords, citation relations of journals, bibliographic coupling along with the international collaboration scenario.…”

Tracking and Mining the COVID-19 Research Literature

“…What?” of this explosively growing research literature [e.g., our biweekly updates, using the standard NLM historical and COVID-19 search query have grown from 19,538 publications on March 25, 2020, to 47,607 on July 2 (used in the present analyses), and 70,193 as of September 6]. Haghani and Bliemer ( 2020 ) and Thelwall ( 2020 ) conducted the case that historical research bears importantly on current COVID-19 research. Such profile information should facilitate identifying and locating key players and their research foci.…”

“…In our NSF project, we intend to complement the use of a core PubMed dataset with clinical trials.gov and WoS. Some variations include the following: Haghani and Bliemer ( 2020 ) and Homolak et al ( 2020 ) used Scopus as well; Liu et al ( 2020 ) complemented PubMed with EMBASE; Niehs' group ( https://www.collabovid.org ) draw upon PubMed, Elsevier, and three preprint resources—medRxiv, bioRxiv, and arXiv. Lima et al ( 2020 ) reviewed the domain drawing upon PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane Library, and Biblioteca Virtual de Saude (BVS).…”

Health-care guidelines and policies during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico: A case of health-inequalities

“…In addition, the lack of continuity of the virtual location of previous documents available (links) and lack of user-friendly platforms hindered the health-professionals' ability to access valuable information. Thus, clinicians were challenged to search, manage and appraise an unprecedented amount of scientific evidence during the COVID-19 response [28] .…”