Author Productivity of COVID-19 Research Output Globally: Testing Lotka's Law

Abstract

COVID-19 is a novel virus with lethal effects on human health, causing respiratory failure and infiltration in the lungs. The present study attempted to examine global publication trends in research associated with COVID-19 and sought the fitness of Lotka's Law, data downloaded from the WHO database (https://www.who.int/). The search term "2019nCoV, COVID -19" was used to retrieve articles published from December 2019 to March 19, 2020. Two thousand two hundred eighteen authors have contributed a total of 2250 articles. Four clusters formed on "author title/abstract," the terms hospital, CoV, coronavirus, pneumonia found associated with 20674 terms, out of which 797 met the threshold. Co-authorship pattern of COVID-19 research generated 6 clusters with 65 authors, "Nishiura, Hiroshi" surpassed the list of co-authors followed by He, Daihai, Zhao, Shi and Zhang, Wei. The Lotka's Law on Authors' Productivity on COVID-19 Literature confirmed the applicability of the Law to the present data collection. The goodness of fit-Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) measured in the COVID-19 research to quantify the pragmatism of the Lotka's rule between the observed collection of data counter to the inverse square rule relation and the possible value of n=2

Keywords: Author Productivity, Research Output, COVID-19, Corona Virus, Lotka’s Law