International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology
[ Article ]
International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology - Vol. 11, No. 4, pp.101-111
ISSN: 2234-0068 (Print) 2287-187X (Online)
Print publication date 30 Dec 2021
Received 05 Apr 2021 Revised 06 May 2021 Accepted 01 Jul 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5865/IJKCT.2021.11.4.101

Research Trends of Coronavirus: Bibliometric Analysis from 1989-2019

Shiv Singh* ; Sanjay Kataria** ; Tulika Dey***
*Assistant Librarian, Bennett University (Times of India Group), Uttar Pradesh, India shivsingh2005@gmail.com
**Librarian, Bennett University (Times of India Group), Uttar Pradesh, India sanjay.kataria@bennett.eu.in
***JPA/Content Writer, Bennett University (Times of India Group), Uttar Pradesh, India tulika.dey@bennett.edu.in

Abstract

The world is going through the most unprecedented time with the outbreak of novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has become a threat to millions. A Coronavirus is a group of viruses that cause a variety of diseases in mammals and birds leading to a range of illnesses in humans including common cold and more severe forms like severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and COVID-19, which are life-threatening. The virus gets its name from its shape which takes the form of a crown with protrusions around it. In December 2019, a pneumonia outbreak was reported in the Wuhan City of China, which was later traced to a novel strain of Coronavirus and termed as Novel COVID-19. It typically causes flu-like symptoms including fever, cough and shortness of breath and is transmitted through human-to-human and there is no cure for it till now. Thus, this bibliometric study has been carried out to analyze the research progress in Coronavirus and literature published during a period of 30 years (1989-2019). Data for the study were fetched from Web of Science(WoS) multidisciplinary database and the publication trends in terms of total articles, productive countries, institutions, journals, productive authors, most cited articles and authors, etc have been analyzed. In total, 4917 articles were retrieved; these were from 711 sources and were contributed by 14442 authors. The collaboration index was 3.11, which clearly indicates that there has been a lot of collaboration in this field. The most preferred journal for the study period was “Journal of Virology” and the maximum contribution has been from the University of Hong Kong.

Keywords:

Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Coronavirus, Bibliometrics, MERS, Mouse Hepatitis, Protein, SARS, Syndrome, Virus

1. Introduction

Every year, around 12,000-61,000 people die of flu around the world (https://www.cdc.gov/). China was dealing with the outbreak of a mysterious virus in Wuhan City by the end of December 2019, when few hundred people with pneumonia and flu-like symptoms died. Researchers reported that the disease was contagious and in a matter of 3-4 months, the disease was transmitted throughout the globe like wildfire. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Coronavirus outbreak as a global pandemic (Cucinotta & Vanelli, 2020).

The outbreak of this pandemic has already caused vast devastation worldwide with death, lockdown, unemployment, overwhelmed healthcare systems and failure of the Government in safeguarding lives. Considering all these damages of the outbreak, an attempt has been made to analyze the literature of the last three decades on Coronavirus using Bibliometrics. This type of analysis has been extensively performed to measure scientific activities in many fields.

1.1. Objectives of the Study

The overall goal of the study was to assess Coronavirus literature with bibliometric technique.

  • ∙ Year-wise growth of publication.
  • ∙ To identify the top sources/journals contributing to Coronavirus research publications.
  • ∙ To study the research performance of World institutions in the field of Coronavirus.
  • ∙ To identify top authors in the field of Coronavirus.

1.2. Scope and Limitations of the Study

The data has been collected for 30 years for a period 1989-2019 from the Web of Science (WoS) database. Relevant bibliometrics techniques were used for publication or citation analysis.


2. Literature Review

COVID-19, an infectious disease is caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. People infected with the COVID-19 virus experience mild to moderate respiratory problems and can recover by home isolation with proper medication (WHO). The outbreak of the disease in December 2019 posed a serious turn and took the shape of an international pandemic within a very short span of time causing mass devastation.

Although by now, it is well known throughout the world that COVID-19 is very different and complicated from SARS and MERS but the scientific knowledge of COVID-19 is still at a nascent stage. There are several studies conducted through bibliometrics on a wide range of subjects. It is therefore important to understand the trends of scientific knowledge in this particular domain (Hossain, 2020). Bibliometric studies in healthcare are conducted to help in assessing the impact of a certain disease across the world, publication pattern over a period of time, most productive countries or institutes, prolific authors, collaboration patterns, etc., which further helps in decision making among researchers as in (Cruz-Calderón et al., 2015), (Chauhan, 2019), (Bundschuh et al., 2013) and many more. Taking into consideration the severity and complexity of the topic, the author selected 30 years as the timeline to understand how the disease has modified from the past as a study on Drone (Chauhan, 2019) for 50 years had been carried to understand its modification and usage patterns.


3. Methodology

The data for this study has been obtained from the renowned database, WoS by Thomson Reuters for a period of 30 years from1989-2019. A total of 4917 documents were obtained. By using scientometric tools, an investigation was performed to assess the quality and quantity of research activity for the total number of published items, prolific authors in the field, type of research activities, journals with high citations, etc.

The term ‘Coronavirus’ (also accommodating COVID-19, Coronavirus (SARS-CoV), the Middle East respiratory syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was taken and searched in the title, abstract and keyword indexes. The data were then analyzed further using MS Excel and Bibliometrix-R. The analysis has been done to extract the growth of publication, citations of publication, top journals and prolific authors and their organization.


4. Results

Based on the analysis of data, 4917 documents were extracted in the form of articles, review papers, book chapters, proceedings, notes, etc. These 4917 documents were contributed by 14442 authors and were published in 711 sources and the average citation per document is 33.69.

Fig. 1 shows the year-wise growth of research publications on Coronavirus from 1989-2019. A total of 4917 articles studied during this period showed a progressive increase in number during the tenure of 30 years. With an average of 1280 publications or 26.03% of growth, the period from 2005-2009 can be marked to have published the highest number followed by the year 2015-2019 with 1153 or 23.45% publications.

Fig. 1.

Year-wise growth of publication

Table 1 gives the characteristics of the growth of the publications studied for a time span of 30 years. Table 1 gives an analysis of the citations received by these 4,917 articles including the citations received per article and per year. The articles published in 2003 scored the highest number of citations (138.5 citations per article). This year was remarkable as World Health Organization announced that a new pathogen, a member of the Coronavirus family which was the cause of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The articles published during 2003-2005 also have an average citation of over 50 citations on average per paper.

Year-wise distribution of articles published

Table 2 enlists 15 top-notch journals publishing on Coronavirus since 1989-2019. Different methodologies were adopted to assess the value of the journals publishing research articles. The top five most productive journals emanating from this analysis include Journal of Virology, Virology, Journal of General Virology, Virus Research, and Emerging Infectious Diseases. All these publications were started in 1989 except Emerging Infectious Diseases that published in this genre in 2003.

Top journals along with their metrics

Among the top journals studied in this paper, the Journal of Virology published 759 articles, which is 15.44% of the total share of a number of articles during the study period of 30 years (1989-2019). It also received a huge number of citations (36,955) with h-index at 91 and g-index at 124. Journal impact factors for this paper is based on Journal Citation Report (JCR). JCR ranking for this journal stood at 4.368. Virology had a JCR ranking 3.374 followed by the Journal of General Virology (2.514) and the journal of Virus Research and journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases at 2.484 and 7.422 ranking, respectively. Journal of Virology received a total of 10697 citations for 279 articles and obtained h-index of 57 and g-index of 82 obtaining 3.374 JCR ranking. Journal of General Virology received a total of 4807 citations on 145 articles. It’s h-index was at 42 and g-index at 61. The journal of Virus Research received a total of 2,585 citations for 119 papers and journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases received a total of 4,687 citations for 114 papers. Journal of Virus Research received h-index of 30 and g-index of 41. Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases received an h-index of 41 and g-index of 64.

JCR impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. The impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years.

Based on the total publication, top 20 author's contributions and research impact for the study period were analyzed in Table 3 along with their index factors including h-index, g-index and their total citation (TC).

Most productive authors of Coronavirus with impact factors

All the authors have more than 50 publications and the top three prolific authors including Yuen KY, Enjuanes L and Perlman S are having more than 100 publications. Yuen KY has been found to be the most productive author with 114 papers which received a hooping (10,471 TC), (h-index = 51), (g-index = 102) and (m-index = 2.83) followed by Enjuanes Lwith111 articles that received a TC of 4,440, (h-index = 43), (g-index = 61) and (m-index = 1.34) followed by Perlman S(104 articles) and Drosten C(94 articles).Regarding the parameter of citation impact, Drosten C was more impactful with the second-highest number of citations (8,986 citations) for 94 papers followed by Chan KH with (7,820 citations) for 66 papers and Peiris JSM with 6,875 citations on 58 papers. However, all these authors had more than 1,000 TC.

Table 4 shows organization-wise contributions on Coronavirus. Top 20 organization along with their countries across the globe are presented. The highest five countries include the US with 1386 publications, Hong Kong with 791 followed by the Netherlands with 292 publications. India secured 4th position with 124 articles from the National Institute of Infectious Disease and China 5th with 100 articles from Fudan University.

Top organizations with corona virus publications

Significant universities from the US include the University of Iowa, University of North Carolina, Vanderbilt University, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, The University of Texas Medical Branch, University of Penn, University of South California, University of Texas, Ohio State University, Scripps Research Institute and Purdue University. The University of Hong Kong and Chinese University of Hong Kong were the top institutes in contributing to the publication of articles in the Corona Virus. Authors from Utrecht University and Leiden University from the Netherlands contributed significantly to the Corona virus.

Table 5 shows country-wise total citations and average article citations of articles on the Corona virus during the study period of 30 years. Top 15 countries with total citations along with their average citations per article.

Top countries with total citations & average article citations

The top five countries include the USA with 52405 total citations (TC), China followed with 26288 TCs and the Netherlands with 16009. Germany and the UK each had 12490 TC and 9033 TCs. However, the Netherlands had the highest average article citation per article with the highest number at 67.83 followed by Switzerland with 46.22 average article citation per article and Germany 43.67. The UK followed with 42.41 and the US with 38.76 average citations per article.

Top 20 articles cited during the study period of 30 years (1989-2019). The most cited articles were analyzed based on the total number of citations scores by these articles during the study period of 30 years in Table 6.

Most Frequently Cited Articles on Corona Virus

Out of 4,917 articles, the top five authors with high total citations include Ksiazek TG obtained the highest citations of 1823 and (TC per year = 101.2778) followed by Drosten C with 1,732 citations (TC per year = 96.2222) and Rota PA with 1,487 citations, Peiris JSM with 1,436 and Zaki AM with 1275 citation. However, articles by author Zaki AM in the journal New England Journal of Medicine received highest TC per year at 141.67.

Fig. 2 summarizes the complete analysis, of the top 20 authors along with their affiliation. These top 20 authors have the affiliation from 20 countries. A strong network is seen from the University of Hong Kong though a majority of them have the roots in the USA.

Fig. 2.

Top 20 Authors from top 20 countries along with affiliation


5. Discussion

Bibliometric methods use various mathematical and statistical measures which are quantitative in nature but they lead to qualitative features, such as publication patterns, prospecting research opportunities, author collaboration patterns, etc. Bibliometric studies often focus on a specialized subject matter and look after its publishing patterns. The patterns may include geographical or institutional aspects, performance indicators in the field for the time period under study, top institutes, country-level participation in publications and authorships. Different significant variants including h-index, g-index or m-index are also important indicators. The amount of international collaborations or co-authorships also play a significant part as it creates awareness among the scientific community. Through this study, an effort has been made to quantify research productivity during a period of 30 years.


6. Conclusion

Based on the WoS database, the characteristics of Coronavirus research output from 1989-2019 were investigated by the authors through bibliometric methods. The study demonstrated some interesting facts about the Coronavirus literature. In total, there were 4,917 documents contributed by 14,442 researchers in 711 sources. The articles published in 2003 scored the highest number of mean citations of 138.85. The Journal of Virology was the topmost journal. The maximum researchers were affiliated with the University of Hong Kong. A significant contribution has been seen from the organization USA, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. Ksiazek TG emerged as the most productive author with the highest citation and h-Index value.

References

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[About the authors]

Shiv Singh is a assistant librarian at the Bennett University. Shiv Singh is corresponding author and can be contacted at: shivsingh2005@gmail.com

Sanjay Kataria is librarian at the Bennett Universit in India, and can be contacted at: sanjay.kataria@bennett.eu.in

Tulika Dey is JPA/Content Writer at the Bennett University, and can be contacted at: tulika.dey@bennett.edu.in

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
Year-wise growth of publication

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.
Top 20 Authors from top 20 countries along with affiliation

Table 1.

Year-wise distribution of articles published

Year No of Articles Mean Total Citation
per Articles
Mean Total Citation
per Year
Citable Years
1989 74 36.89 1.19 31
1990 85 44.93 1.50 30
1991 92 41.37 1.43 29
1992 83 46.01 1.64 28
1993 58 34.86 1.29 27
1994 67 33.51 1.29 26
1995 80 31.53 1.26 25
1996 69 37.22 1.55 24
1997 76 42.79 1.86 23
1998 89 29.94 1.36 22
1999 66 32.12 1.53 21
2000 70 38.40 1.92 20
2001 99 32.14 1.69 19
2002 59 38.81 2.16 18
2003 133 138.85 8.17 17
2004 333 53.93 3.37 16
2005 349 50.44 3.36 15
2006 312 32.29 2.31 14
2007 237 35.00 2.69 13
2008 207 27.45 2.29 12
2009 175 23.82 2.17 11
2010 166 26.30 2.63 10
2011 127 25.24 2.80 9
2012 157 35.94 4.49 8
2013 225 43.76 6.25 7
2014 276 33.92 5.65 6
2015 225 19.32 3.86 5
2016 259 14.21 3.55 4
2017 215 8.81 2.94 3
2018 220 4.67 2.33 2
2019 234 1.39 1.39 1

Table 2.

Top journals along with their metrics

S. No. Name of Journal h_
index
g_
index
m_
index
Total
Citation
No. of
articles
Publication start IF (JCR 2017)
1 Journal of Virology 91 124 2.84 36,955 759 1989 4.368
2 Virology 57 82 1.78 10,697 279 1989 3.374
3 Journal of General Virology 42 61 1.31 4,807 145 1989 2.514
4 Virus Research 30 41 0.94 2,585 119 1989 2.484
5 Emerging Infectious Diseases 41 64 2.28 4,687 114 2003 7.422
6 Archives of Virology 22 35 0.69 1,642 87 1989 2.16
7 Veterinary Microbiology 27 37 0.84 1,800 84 1989 2.524
8 Plos One 21 33 1.40 1,328 76 2006 2.766
9 Journal of Virological Methods 23 34 0.72 1,389 74 1989 1.756
10 Journal of Infectious Diseases 31 51 1.03 2,716 72 1991 5.186
11 Viruses-Basel 20 30 1.67 1,004 68 2009 3.761
12 Journal of Clinical Microbiology 30 49 0.97 2,538 65 1990 4.054
13 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 41 62 1.28 6,453 62 1989 9.504
14 Nidoviruses: Toward Control of SARS and Other Nidovirus Diseases 9 11 0.60 241 57 2006 -
15 Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 26 43 1.44 1,963 51 2003 2.559

Table 3.

Most productive authors of Coronavirus with impact factors

S. No. Author h_index g_index m_index TC NP PY_Start
*TC=Total citation, NP=Number of publications, PY_Start= Publication Starting Year
1 Yuen KY 51 102 2.83 10,471 114 2003
2 Enjuanes L 43 61 1.34 4,440 111 1989
3 Perlman S 37 52 1.16 3,402 104 1989
4 Drosten C 41 94 2.28 8,986 94 2003
5 Rottier PJM 43 74 1.48 5,697 91 1992
6 Baric RS 36 59 1.16 3,640 86 1990
7 Liu DX 30 40 1.00 1,916 76 1991
8 Weiss SR 33 51 1.03 2,851 75 1989
9 Woo PCY 34 70 2.00 4,976 71 2004
10 Makino S 33 51 1.03 2,768 68 1989
11 Chan KH 44 66 2.44 7,820 66 2003
12 Saif LJ 30 41 0.94 1,999 66 1989
13 Talbot PJ 27 40 0.84 1,773 66 1989
14 Lau SKP 32 64 1.88 4,729 64 2004
15 Holmes KV 32 55 1.00 3,061 60 1989
16 Memish ZA 31 59 3.44 3,769 59 2012
17 Peiris JSM 36 58 2.00 6,875 58 2003
18 Buonavoglia C 25 36 1.14 1,465 56 1999
19 Taguchi F 23 37 0.72 1,449 54 1989

Table 4.

Top organizations with corona virus publications

S. No. Name of Organization Country No. of Articles
1 Univ Hong Kong Hong Kong 514
2 Univ Iowa United States 229
3 Univ N Carolina United States 217
4 Univ Utrecht Netherlands 203
5 Chinese Univ Hong Kong Hong Kong 191
6 Vanderbilt Univ United States 139
7 Ctr Dis Control and Prevent United States 131
8 Natl Inst Infect Dis India 124
9 Univ Texas Med Branch United States 112
10 Univ Penn United States 111
11 Univ So Calif United States 102
12 Fudan Univ China 100
13 Univ Texas United States 97
14 Natl Taiwan Univ Taiwan 90
15 Leiden Univ Netherlands 89
16 Univ Bonn Germany 88
17 Ohio State Univ United States 83
18 Scripps Res Inst United States 83
19 Purdue Univ United States 82
20 Natl Univ Singapore Singapore 79

Table 5.

Top countries with total citations & average article citations

S. No. Country TC Average Article Citations
*TC=Total citations
1 USA 52,405 38.76
2 China 26,288 32.45
3 Netherlands 16,009 67.83
4 Germany 12,490 43.67
5 United Kingdom 9,033 42.41
6 Canada 5,739 28.41
7 Saudi Arabia 4,857 33.5
8 France 4,372 31.45
9 Japan 4,141 18.08
10 Spain 3,945 32.88
11 Singapore 3,548 28.38
12 Taiwan 2,629 19.47
13 Italy 2,604 22.84
14 Switzerland 2,080 46.22
15 Australia 1,806 30.61

Table 6.

Most Frequently Cited Articles on Corona Virus

S. No. Authors, Years & Publications TC TC (Per Year)
*TC=Total citations
1 Ksiazek Tg, 2003, New Engl J Med 1,823 101.2778
2 Drosten C, 2003, New Engl J Med 1,732 96.2222
3 Rota Pa, 2003, Science 1,487 82.6111
4 PEIRIS JSM, 2003, LANCET-A 1,436 79.7778
5 Zaki Am, 2012, New Engl J Med 1,275 141.6667
6 Marra Ma, 2003, Science 1,273 70.7222
7 Li Wh, 2003, Nature 968 53.7778
8 Guan Y, 2003, Science 881 48.9444
9 Li Wd, 2005, Science 841 52.5625
10 Peiris Jsm, 2003, Lancet 826 45.8889
11 Van Der Hoek L, 2004, Nat Med 742 43.6471
12 Snijder Ej, 2003, J Mol Biol 677 37.6111
13 Woo Pcy, 2005, J Virol 646 40.375
14 Lau Skp, 2005, P Natl Acad Sci Usa 643 40.1875
15 Lai Mmc, 1997, Adv Virus Res 545 22.7083
16 Assiri A, 2013, New Engl J Med 536 67
17 Kuiken T, 2003, Lancet 483 26.8333
18 Anand K, 2003, Science 467 25.9444
19 Brierley I, 1989, Cell 465 14.5312
20 Raj Vs, 2013, Nature 460 57.5