Bibliometric Study of International Scientific Production on the Novel Coronavirus COVID-19

Abstract

The Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 was first identified in China and became a global health problem due to its pathogenicity and widespread distribution around the world. On March 11, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, its first designation since it declared H1N1 flu a pandemic in 2009. This study aims to map international scientific production on the Novel Coronavirus. The search term “COVID-19” was used in the ISI Web of Knowledge / Web of Science^TM database, analysing the records that present the term selected for the search. As a methodological path, a bibliometric research was carried out in academic works on the Web of Science^TM, identifying, after applying the refinement filters, 64 publication records in 36 different journals. As the main results of the analyses, the top journals of the theme and the most cited articles were identified. Although this research does not cover all scientific production information about the new Corona virus “COVID-19”, it was possible to search for documents of high scientific relevance so that we have an overview of the scientific production world on the subject.

Introduction

Coronaviruses are enveloped RNA viruses that are widely distributed among humans, other mammals and birds and that cause respiratory, enteric, liver and neurological diseases [1,2]. Although these viruses generally have low pathogenicity, two epidemics have occurred on the last two decades: the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2002 and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012, both emerging from animal reservoirs to cause global occurrence in humans with alarming morbidity and mortality [3].

In late December 2019, Chinese authorities reported clusters of patients with pneumonia of unknown cause that were epidemiologically linked to a large market selling many species of live animals in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China [4]. Chinese scientists isolated the virus from a patient in a short time and on January 7, 2020 published the sequencing of the SARSCoV-2 genome, thus facilitating the monitoring of the evolution of the virus around the globe [5]. On January 30, 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global health emergency and on March 11, 2020, it declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, its first designation since it declared H1N1 flu a pandemic in 2009 [6].

As of March 20, 2020, the COVID-19 was affecting 186 countries and territories around the world and 1 international conveyance (the Diamond Princess cruise ship harboured in Yokohama, Japan). There had been 234,073 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 9,840 deaths at that time [7].

The rapid progression and little knowledge of the infection by COVID-19, opened the eyes of researchers spread by the globe in the search for more information, definitions, analyses and studies about the pathogen and its interaction with the human body. Much already has been published in the last months and we have objectives to make a bibliometric study. An earlier bibliometric analysis evaluated the scientific literature on different coronaviruses [8], but this study aims to map international scientific production on the SARS-CoV-2.