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. 2020 Jul 2;20(1):177.
doi: 10.1186/s12874-020-01059-y.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): an evidence map of medical literature

Nan Liu  1   2 , Marcel Lucas Chee  3 , Chenglin Niu  4 , Pin Pin Pek  4   5 , Fahad Javaid Siddiqui  4 , John Pastor Ansah  4 , David Bruce Matchar  4   6 , Sean Shao Wei Lam  4   7 , Hairil Rizal Abdullah  4   8 , Angelique Chan  4 , Rahul Malhotra  4 , Nicholas Graves  4 , Mariko Siyue Koh  4   9 , Sungwon Yoon  4 , Andrew Fu Wah Ho  4   5 , Daniel Shu Wei Ting  4   10 , Jenny Guek Hong Low  4   11 , Marcus Eng Hock Ong  4   5
Affiliations

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): an evidence map of medical literature

Nan Liu et al. BMC Med Res Methodol. .

Abstract

Background: Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in December 2019, a substantial body of COVID-19 medical literature has been generated. As of June 2020, gaps and longitudinal trends in the COVID-19 medical literature remain unidentified, despite potential benefits for research prioritisation and policy setting in both the COVID-19 pandemic and future large-scale public health crises.

Methods: In this paper, we searched PubMed and Embase for medical literature on COVID-19 between 1 January and 24 March 2020. We characterised the growth of the early COVID-19 medical literature using evidence maps and bibliometric analyses to elicit cross-sectional and longitudinal trends and systematically identify gaps.

Results: The early COVID-19 medical literature originated primarily from Asia and focused mainly on clinical features and diagnosis of the disease. Many areas of potential research remain underexplored, such as mental health, the use of novel technologies and artificial intelligence, pathophysiology of COVID-19 within different body systems, and indirect effects of COVID-19 on the care of non-COVID-19 patients. Few articles involved research collaboration at the international level (24.7%). The median submission-to-publication duration was 8 days (interquartile range: 4-16).

Conclusions: Although in its early phase, COVID-19 research has generated a large volume of publications. However, there are still knowledge gaps yet to be filled and areas for improvement for the global research community. Our analysis of early COVID-19 research may be valuable in informing research prioritisation and policy planning both in the current COVID-19 pandemic and similar global health crises.

Keywords: COVID-19; Coronavirus; Evidence gap map; Review; SARS-CoV-2.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
PRISMA flow diagram
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Distribution of articles by country
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Fractions of a articles and b cases from each continent from 14 January to 24 March 2020
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Evidence maps of the distribution of article topics by a article type and b continent of origin
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Evidence map of the distribution of article topics by medical speciality
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Distribution of topics of overview papers
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Fractions of articles by a topic, b type, and c speciality from 14 January to 24 March 2020
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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