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. 2020 Dec;10(2):020508.
doi: 10.7189/jogh.10.020508.

Coronavirus: An insight into global research until outbreak of COVID-19 and its implications for the future

Doris Klingelhöfer  1 , Markus Braun  1 , Dörthe Brüggmann  1 , David A Groneberg  1
Affiliations

Coronavirus: An insight into global research until outbreak of COVID-19 and its implications for the future

Doris Klingelhöfer et al. J Glob Health. 2020 Dec.

Abstract

Background: The currently prevailing global threat of COVID-19 caused the publication numbers on coronaviruses to explode. The awareness of the scientific and public community is enormous. But what about the sense of all these undertakings and what can be learned about the future for a better understanding? These questions were answered with established bibliometric analyses of the time until the avalanche of publications unfolded.

Methods: Chronological, geographical aspects of publication output on coronavirus were also evaluated under the influence of epidemiological and socio-economic parameters.

Results: The trend in publication and citation numbers shows the strong influence of the past pandemics SARS and MERS with an untypical decline afterward. Research is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary over time. The USA and China, as the countries with the highest number of publications, are being displaced by other countries in the consideration of socio-economic and epidemiological aspects, which shows the effect of regional interest in corona research. A significant correlation was found between the number of SARS cases per country and related publications, while no correlation was found for MERS cases and articles.

Conclusions: The results underline the need for sustainable and forward-looking approaches that should not end with the containment of COVID-19.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest. The authors completed the ICMJE Unified Competing Interest form (available upon request from the corresponding author), and declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Research foci of CoV publications. Panel A. Keyword clusters with at least 150 occurrences, red = Molecular and biochemical topics, blue = SARS-related topics, yellow = MERS-related topics, green = spike protein and pathogenesis. Panel B. Percentage of most assigned subject areas in 5-year intervals.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Chronological development of coronavirus articles. Panel A. Number of articles and their number of citations over time, dashed line: cited half-life (CHL). Panel B. Relative number of articles per 10 000 articles indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) of Web of Science.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Countries’ publication performance on coronavirus (CoV). Panel A. Number of articles per country. Panel B. Relative share of articles of the most publishing countries in 5-year intervals.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Citation parameters of coronavirus (CoV) articles. Panel A. Number of citations per country. Panel B. Average citation rate (number of citations / number of articles) per country, threshold = 30 articles on CoV.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Demographic and science-related parameters of coronavirus (CoV) articles, threshold = 30 articles on CoV. Panel A. Number of articles / population in mill. inhabitants. Panel B. Number of articles / GERD in bn PPP$, GERD = gross expenditure in research and development, PPP$ = purchasing power parity in US-Dollars. * Singapore was the leading country in both analyses, but could not be presented in a distorted way due to methodological limitations. Therefore, it was added manually as point.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Epidemiological parameters sorted by cases. Panel A. Number of SARS cases (logarithmic display) and number of articles / number of SARS cases. Panel B. Number of MERs cases (logarithmic display) and number of articles / number of MERS cases. UAE – United Arab Emirates, UK – United Kingdom, USA – United States of America
Figure 7
Figure 7
International publication network on coronavirus (CoV) (threshold for the display: at least 5 collaboration articles between countries).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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