Early research on COVID-19: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

In December 2019, an outbreak of pneumonia, which was named COVID2019, emerged as a global health crisis. Scientists worldwide are engaged in attempts to elucidate the transmission and pathogenic mechanisms of the causative coronavirus. COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, making it critical to track and review the state of research on COVID-19 to provide guidance for further investigations. Here, bibliometric and knowledge mapping analyses of studies on COVID-19 were performed, including more than 1,500 papers on COVID-19 available in the PubMed and China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases from January 1, 2020 to March 8, 2020. In this review, we found that because of the rapid response of researchers worldwide, the number of COVID-19-related publications showed a high growth trend in the first 10 days of February; among these, the largest number of studies originated in China, the country most affected by pandemic in its early stages. Our findings revealed that the epidemic situation and data accessibility of different research teams have caused obvious difference in emphases of the publications. Besides, there was an unprecedented level of close cooperation and information sharing within the global scientific community relative to previous coronavirus research. We combed and drew the knowledge map of the SARS-CoV-2 literature, explored early status of research on etiology, pathology, epidemiology, treatment, prevention, and control, and discussed knowledge gaps that remain to be urgently addressed. Future perspectives on treatment, prevention, and control are also presented to provide fundamental references for current and future coronavirus research.