The First-Three-Month Review of Research on Covid-19: A Scientometrics Analysis

Abstract

Responsiveness is one of dimensions in the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI). This dimension, among others, is manifested through responses to the challenges faced by society. Responsiveness from the scientific community is clearly evident recently in the response to the recent great challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to provide an early review to assess publications in the first three months of the pandemic, since December 2019. Scientometrics and descriptive statistics were used to analyse documents indexed in the Scopus academic database. Open access tools from VOSviewer were used to help in visualising the network of countries and research topic density map. On average, 150.33 documents were published every month, with medicine as the main field of research (62.04%). Researchers from China, US, and UK institutions have published the most documents. Analysis of the keywords shows that the main topics of research regarded acute respiratory diseases, contact tracing, and molecular epidemiology. Although fields such as psychology, mathematics, computer science, engineering, nursing, business, management and accounting still have very few Covid-19 related studies at the moment, these fields likely to contribute in the future with regard to the great impact of this pandemic.