Research Output and International Cooperation Among Countries During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

Background The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has instigated immediate and massive worldwide research efforts. Rapid publication of research data may be desirable but also carries the risk of quality loss. Objective This analysis aimed to correlate the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak with its related scientific output per country. Methods All articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic were retrieved from Web of Science and analyzed using the web application SciPE (science performance evaluation), allowing for large data scientometric analyses of the global geographical distribution of scientific output. Results A total of 7185 publications, including 2592 articles, 2091 editorial materials, 2528 early access papers, 1479 letters, 633 reviews, and other contributions were extracted. The top 3 countries involved in COVID-19 research were the United States, China, and Italy. The confirmed COVID-19 cases or deaths per region correlated with scientific research output. The United States was most active in terms of collaborative efforts, sharing a significant amount of manuscript authorships with the United Kingdom, China, and Italy. The United States was China’s most frequent collaborative partner, followed by the United Kingdom. Conclusions The COVID-19 research landscape is rapidly developing and is driven by countries with a generally strong prepandemic research output but is also significantly affected by countries with a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases. Our findings indicate that the United States is leading international collaborative efforts.

A Scientometric Analysis of Highly Cited Publications and a Summary of Top 25 Articles Regarding Covid-19

“…Satisfactory time for peer-review processes must be maintained even in high rank journals [37]. We found that Chinese authors were mostly cited.…”

“…In this period, it was reported that time Indeed, the turnover time from submission to acceptance reduced by 49% [42]. Moreover, Some manuscripts were actually accepted on the day of submission [37]. Inevitable consequence of this rush is loss of quality and mistakes.…”

“…Before pandemics the USA ranked in the first place in terms of contribution to the scientific literature [36]. In a study investigating the contributions of the countries during pandemics, the USA was the leading country to publish COVID-19 related articles with 1,806 research items followed by China (n=1,306), Italy (n=856) and the UK (n=817) [37]. Nevertheless, our results revealed that when highly cited articles are considered, China was determined to be the leading country.…”

Discovering temporal scientometric knowledge in COVID-19 scholarly production

“…Since the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, many research communities and agencies dedicated their efforts to fight against this infectious disease with their own resources and means. One of these efforts was the sharing of coronavirus-related scientific research as openly as possible (Colavizza et al 2021 ; Grammes et al 2020 ; Tornberg et al 2021 ).…”

Bibliometrics of Latin American research on COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic: the main trends

“…COVID-19 editorial materials in the beginning stage of the pandemic were analyzed (López-López et al, 2021). The patterns of international collaboration on COVID-19 (Duan & Xia, 2021;Grammes et al, 2020) were studies. COVID-19 pandemic-related research in Africa (Fonkou et al, 2021), in Iran (Shamsi et al, 2020), and in the Latin American contributions (Gregorio-Chaviano et al, 2020) were also reported.…”