How scientific research reacts to international public health emergencies: a global analysis of response patterns

Abstract

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.

Scientific Globalism During A Global Crisis:Research Collaboration and Open Access Publications on COVID-19

“…Although geopolitical tensions are ongoing, the extent of scientific globalism is generally higher in times of a global crisis and on the global crisis issue. The findings support past research that research productivity increases during public health emergencies (Zhang, Zhao, Sun, et al, 2020) and that most COVID-19 research is produced within countries, with China leading in COVID-19 publications (Hook & Porter, 2020;Hossain, 2020;Chahrour, Assi, Bejjani, et al, 202). Further analyses showed variations by countries and that while a country's prior patterns mattered in collaborating on internationally authored publications, the extent to which the country was affected by COVID-19 increases the likelihood they would participate in international collaboration.…”

“…The countries most affected, however, do not produce the most articles; the countries with the highest number of publications in different areas were China (SARS), the US (Ebola), and Turkey (Crimean-Congo). The peaks in publication rates corresponded with the timeframe of the respective outbreaks, as was also found for COVID-19 publications (Zhang, L., Zhao, W., Sun, B. et al, 2020).…”

“…analysis of the current and past coronaviruses research over the past two decades, Tao and colleagues (2020) found that while the US has the highest level of degree centrality, or has the highest impact on other countries (followed by France and the UK), research teams are relatively scattered, as demonstrated by the study's low-density global map. Bibliometric studies further identified a positive relationship between COVID-19 cases and publications; countries that were most affected by COVID-19 also produced the most scientific documents (Dehghanbanadaki, et al, 2020;Zhang, Zhao, Sun, et al, 2020), but this pattern was not always consistent. It was also observed that some of the countries especially hit by the current coronavirus (i.e., Italy and Iran) produced disproportionately fewer articles, suggesting a research shortage based on an overstrain of healthcare facilities and physicians, which took precedence over publishing observational studies and case reports (Chahrour, Assi, Bejjani, et al, 2020).…”

Scientometrics analysis of recent trends in Global Corona virus Research

“…Zhang, L., Zhao, W. J., Sun, B. B., Huang, Y., & Glänzel, W. (2020) [11] discovered that academic community have often acted immediately to crises of global health with a substantial increase in the papers directly following the WHO's statement of pandemic. Study in the areas of virology, contagious diseases and immunology has been the most productive, and have found two speci c characteristics in world -wide science that differentiate studies in America and Europe that concentrates mostly on population health from that in Japan and China, with stronger focus respectively on biomedical research and clinical pharmacy.…”

Systematic review of bibliometric studies on SARS-CoV-2

“…Europe and North America develop collaborative research with the main countries and with the outbreak regions, as observed with Ebola in Africa. SARS research is commonly conducted by China and the USA, with European countries' contributions relatively low 6 .…”