A Scientometric Analysis of Global COVID-19 Research Based on Dimensions Database

Abstract

The current outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has posed many challenges before the whole world. Many countries and territories went into lockdown. To control the ongoing pandemic, the scientific communities have boosted their Research and Development (R & D) activities. Many publishers have dropped their paywalls and provided open access to coronavirus literature. The present study analyzed 2184 publications on COVID-19, indexed by Dimensions database during the period of 1st January to 27th March 2020. The study found a multi-authorship trend in the literature of COVID-19. The data reveals China as a highly cited country. The collaboration network of Hiroshi Nishiura was found to be strong. The ‘Nature’ has emerged as the productive journal contributing the highest number of citations. It is interesting to note that the researchers preferred ‘medRxiv’( the Preprint Server for Health Sciences) to distribute and share their preprints related to COVID-19. It is found that the majority of prolific institutions contributing to COVID-19 related publications belong to China. The collaboration network of Fudan University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Hong Kong were found to be strong. The list of highly cited references is dominated by two journals i.e. ‘The Lancet’ & ‘New England Journal of Medicine’. The study reported coronavirus, pandemic, data, ncov, etc. as the frequently occurred keywords in the COVID-19 publications.

Keywords: Coronavirus Disease 2019, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Dimensions database, Scientometrics