Global Research on COVID-19 Disease: A Scientific Assessment of Publications during 2020-21

Abstract

The study aims to evaluate global research output (103054 records) on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) based on quantitative and qualitative indicators. It presents a bibliometric profile of most influential countries, organizations, authors and journals and their collaborative linkages, besides identifying broad subject areas of research, most significant keywords and highly-cited papers related to COVID-19. During 2020-21, more than 150 countries participated in COVID-19 research, of which top 10 countries accounted for a 82.93% global share. The USA, China and U.K. produced the most articles (25.86%, 10.77% and 10.7% respectively). (169.55). The most productive organizations originate from most productive countries and they contribute the most collaborative papers. The top three journals, namely International Journal of Environmental Research, BMJ and PLOS One contributed 961, 854 and 781 papers, respectively. The top three journals in terms of citations per paper (CPP) are New England Journal of Medicine (122.78), The Lancet (106.3) and JAMA (75.17). The most ubiquitous topic was COVID-19 clinical studies, with maximum focus on virological aspects (9.58%), respiratory aspects (6.97%), molecular aspects (3.11%), genetic aspects (3.09%) and immunological aspects (1.3%).