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. 2020 Aug 1;9(8):giaa085.
doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giaa085.

Scientometric trends for coronaviruses and other emerging viral infections

Dima Kagan  1 , Jacob Moran-Gilad  2 , Michael Fire  1
Affiliations

Scientometric trends for coronaviruses and other emerging viral infections

Dima Kagan et al. Gigascience. .

Abstract

Background: COVID-19 is the most rapidly expanding coronavirus outbreak in the past 2 decades. To provide a swift response to a novel outbreak, prior knowledge from similar outbreaks is essential.

Results: Here, we study the volume of research conducted on previous coronavirus outbreaks, specifically SARS and MERS, relative to other infectious diseases by analyzing >35 million articles from the past 20 years. Our results demonstrate that previous coronavirus outbreaks have been understudied compared with other viruses. We also show that the research volume of emerging infectious diseases is very high after an outbreak and decreases drastically upon the containment of the disease. This can yield inadequate research and limited investment in gaining a full understanding of novel coronavirus management and prevention.

Conclusions: Independent of the outcome of the current COVID-19 outbreak, we believe that measures should be taken to encourage sustained research in the field.

Keywords: SARS; coronavirus; emerging viruses; epidemics.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
The number of papers over time.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Normalized paper rate by different diseases over time. Diseases that have a drastic increase in their normalized number of publications mostly coincide with an epidemic.
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
Normalized citation rate by different diseases over time. Diseases that have a drastic increase in their normalized number of citations mostly represent an outbreak.
Figure 4:
Figure 4:
Publications by quartile over time for different diseases. Unlike other emerging infectious diseases, avian influenza did not demonstrate a decline in Q1 publications.
Figure 5:
Figure 5:
Number of papers by top-10 publications over time for different diseases.
Figure 6:
Figure 6:
JScore over time for different diseases. Except for MERS, all presented diseases show an increase in JScore.
Figure 7:
Figure 7:
Number of researchers in each country for each disease. Most of the research was conducted in a small number of countries.
Figure 8:
Figure 8:
International research on the coronavirus.
Figure 9:
Figure 9:
DTW distance between NPR of diseases.
Figure 10:
Figure 10:
DTW distance between NCR of diseases.
Figure 11:
Figure 11:
Normalized paper rate of the virology category by different diseases over time.
Figure 12:
Figure 12:
Normalized citation rate of the virology category by different diseases over time.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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MeSH terms