The scientific literature on Coronaviruses, COVID-19 and its associated safety-related research dimensions: A scientometric analysis and scoping review

Abstract

The COVID-19 global pandemic has generated an abundance of research quickly following the outbreak. Within only a few months, more than a thousand studies on this topic have already appeared in the scientific literature. In this short review, we analyse the bibliometric aspects of these studies on a macro level, as well as those addressing Coronaviruses in general. Furthermore, through a scoping analysis of the literature on COVID-19, we identify the main safety-related dimensions that these studies have thus far addressed. Our findings show that across various research domains, and apart from the medical and clinical aspects such as the safety of vaccines and treatments, issues related to patient transport safety, occupational safety of healthcare professionals, biosafety of laboratories and facilities, social safety, food safety, and particularly mental/psychological health and domestic safety have thus far attracted most attention of the scientific community in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis also uncovers various potentially significant safety problems caused by this global health emergency which currently have attracted only limited scientific focus but may warrant more attention. These include matters such as cyber safety, economic safety, and supply-chain safety. These findings highlight why, from an academic research perspective, a holistic interdisciplinary approach and a collective scientific effort is required to help understand and mitigate the various safety impacts of this crisis whose implications reach far beyond the bio-medical risks. Such holistic safety-scientific understanding of the COVID-19 crisis can furthermore be instrumental to be better prepared for a future pandemic.

Keywords: 2019-nCov; COVID-19; Novel coronavirus; Safety.

Graphical abstract

Fig. 1

Summary statistics on bibliographic details of the studies published on Coronaviruses and COVID-19. (a) The temporal distribution of the publications on Coronaviruses as well as their cumulative number of publications (data for 2020 only represents the first three months). Plots (b) and (c) show most published authors and journals on Coronaviruses respectively. Plots (d) and (e) show authors and journals with the highest number of publications on COVID-19 respectively. Plots (f) and (g) respectively show the top subject areas and top document types for publications on COVID-19.

Fig. 2

Heat map of the sources that have published studies on (a) Coronaviruses and (b) COVID-19. In (a) and (b) the minimum number of documents of a journal to be visualised is respectively 20 and 5. The item weights are proportional to the number of documents published by each source.

Fig. 3

The distribution of the geographical origin of the scholarly publications (a) on Coronaviruses, (b) on COVID-19.

Fig. 4

Most frequent terms appeared in the title and abstract of the publications on COVID-19 based on the Scopus analyse search results.

Fig. 5

The network of the hot terms associated with publications on (a) Coronaviruses and (b) COVID-19.

Fig. 6

The heatmap of the network of the hot terms associated with publications on (a) Coronaviruses and (b) COVID-19.

Fig. 7

The network of the hot terms associated with publications on Coronaviruses overlaid with a colour-coding of the average year of publications in which each term has appeared. The minimum number of occurrences for each term to be included in the map is 30 times.

Fig. 8

Research dimensions related to the safety impact of the COVID-19 pandemic addressed by academic studies.