Scientometrics analysis of recent trends in Global Corona virus Research

Background: The worldwide pandemic COVID-19 has produced a wealth of research more rapidly after the outbreak. In just a couple of months, there is a rise in several studies on Coronavirus, adding up to the scholarly literature. Method: The current study attempts to Scientometric analyze very recent literature on Coronaviruses just before and after the outbreak. Besides, the objective of this exploration was to assess the global research progress on Coronavirus in recent times. The current research is an analytical descriptive study using Scientometrics. The study sample includes research papers about the Coronavirus indexed in Web of Science (WoS) database from January 1, 2019 to May 14, 2020. The records with topic search (includes Title, Abstract, Keywords and Keywords Plus) “coronavirus” were extracted. These data were analyzed by MS Excel and the visualizations were created using Tableau Result: The results showed that 2551 scientic literature about the Coronavirus was indexed in WoS. A considerable number of these articles were published in journals such as the Journal of Medical Virology, Viruses, Nature, and Lancet. Authors from China, USA and Italy were the most prolic authors. About 47.51% articles received total of 11435 citations with an average of 9 citations, which indicates that nearly half articles were cited in another publication. The highest and lowest citations for these articles were 737 and 1, respectively. Conclusion: These results show a high rate of research on Coronavirus. treatments are not available for COVID–19. But, several studies are being conducted for inventing prospective treatments for the Coronavirus disease. The evaluation of such scholarly output becomes absolutely necessary for understanding the on-going and latest research trend and progress. The present study uses the scientometrics techniques to understand the advancement and inuence of research in Coronaviruses.


Introduction
Even though the research in various Microbiological elds is vibrant, of late the Coronavirus and its research have gained extreme attention among the general public. It has brought about a sudden change in our regular lifestyle which was unimaginable earlier. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a previously undiscovered coronavirus which causes the infectious disease. Whenever an infected patient coughs or sneezes, the COVID-19 virus spreads mainly through particles of saliva or discharge from the nose. The majority of the people infected with COVID-19 will have mild to moderate respiratory problems [1]. The impact of the Coronavirus has created a sense of panic and indeed has proved to be fatal to citizens of various countries. Global nations are continuously ghting to withstand and eradicate this catastrophic virus to save the lives of many.
Currently, vaccines or treatments are not available for COVID-19. But, several studies are being conducted for inventing prospective treatments for the Coronavirus disease. The evaluation of such scholarly output becomes absolutely necessary for understanding the on-going and latest research trend and progress. The present study uses the scientometrics techniques to understand the advancement and in uence of research in Coronaviruses.

Coronaviruses: An Overview
A coronavirus is a common virus that causes nose, sinus, or upper throat infection [2]. In early 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) identi ed SARS-CoV-2 as a new type of Coronavirus, after an epidemic in China in December 2019. COVID-19 is an infection caused by SARS-CoV-2, which healthcare professionals call an infection in the respiratory system. It may affect one's upper respiratory system (sinus, nose, throat) or lower respiratory system (windpipe, lungs). It tends to spread the same manner like other coronaviruses, primarily via contact from human to human. Infections vary from mild to severe.
Yao, Q., Chen, K., Yao, L. et al. (2014) [7] showed that health systems research (HSR) has increased rapidly from over 20 years. Study in this area has focused primarily on general populace, environmental and occupational health (21.46%), public healthcare sciences and services (20.29%), general and internal medicine (13.14%). Batcha, M. S. (2018) [8] derived data from the Web of Science to provide a qualitative and quantitative comparison between worldwide Swine Flu research and 25 year Indian publications . Where India's research output on Swine Flu research was widely scattered across various journals and this tendency seems to be one of the factors of its limited citation impact. Bhattacharya, S., & Singh, S. (2020) [9] tried to identify which articles are the most in uential, the key body of knowledge and the major research topics in COVID-19. Study observed that all of the top co-cited papers were published in high impact factor journals. It was also found that many studies were driven by epidemiology and clinical characteristics of the disease. The trends observed in measures like lockdown, social distancing and quarantine at global and country level showed the societal increasing concern with these aspects. Haghani, M., Bliemer, M. C., Goerlandt, F., & Li, J. (2020) [10] conducted analysis that identi es a variety of potential problems induced by this world health crisis that has attracted only narrow research attention but may warrant more interest. It included issues such as internet security, economic security, and the protection of supply chains. Zhang, L., Zhao, W. J., Sun, B. B., Huang, Y., & Glänzel, W. (2020) [11] discovered that academic community have often acted immediately to crises of global health with a substantial increase in the papers directly following the WHO's statement of pandemic. Study in the areas of virology, contagious diseases and immunology has been the most productive, and have found two speci c characteristics in world -wide science that differentiate studies in America and Europe that concentrates mostly on population health from that in Japan and China, with stronger focus respectively on biomedical research and clinical pharmacy. Di Girolamo, N., & Reynders, R. M. (2020) [12]

Data Analysis
Papers retrieved from the WoS were evaluated by date of the publication, countries, title, author and organization. Results of the study were evaluated and converted to graphs in MS Excel.. The overall amount of citations and the average citation for every paper were assessed for all articles published that referred to Coronavirus. The amount of literature could be used as an indicator of the amount of output in this regard. Analysis of citations is being used as a measure for both the publications impact on the research community and for the quality of study. Author Collaboration related data visualization was created using Tableau [15].
Finally, quality of research papers and priority of research in Coronavirus among countries was explored. Other, analysis of data revealed highly cited articles, prominent funding agencies, major disciplines within which Coronavirus research is being conducted and the proli c journal that has published majority of Coronavirus research papers.

Amount of published items
The query in the Web of Science (WoS) database resulted in 2551 publications with a reference to Coronavirus. In the study time frame, a rapid increase of publications in this subject area can be observed (Fig. 2); especially a remarkable increase in Coronavirus related research output in WoS can be noted in the current year i.e. 2020. Almost more than half of the publications (62 percent) were published in the current year. All the highly cited publications were found in 2020.

7.1.Authorship Trends in top Countries
It is evident from the Figure 3, that about 89% were collaborative research either by two authors or more than two authors. Only 11% of contributions were by single authors. China followed by USA and all other countries with top publication output showed highest number of collaborative authorship with more than three authored papers.  The Relative Quality Index (RQI) for various top countries relates to the frequency of high quality papers for a given country. The top countries along with their total number of publications, citation per paper (CPP), total citations, number of high quality papers and relative quality index are indicated in Table 2. The average value of CPP is 2.93. The value of CPP is highest for the China. Other countries having higher than average value for CPP are USA, England, Germany, Canada, Japan and Netherlands. Table 2 also indicates that since the value of the RQI is more than 1 the countries namely South Korea, England, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India, France, Canada, Japan, Iran, Switzerland, Netherlands and Brazil have higher than average frequency of high quality papers. For the other countries, the incidence of high quality papers is less than average. The value of the RQI is highest in case of Brazil (2.87) in comparison to the other countries, which implies that it has more quality research output than other countries (Fig. 5).  Table 3. Surprisingly, all the top cited articles include collaboration of authors. Majority of top cited papers were from Lancet journal securing 1669 citations.   (Table 4).

7.5.Research Priority Index (RPI) of top countries
The mere assessment of quantum of publications perhaps may not be an effective method to judge the quantity of output in respective sub-elds of a subject eld. Hence, the technique Research Priority Index (RPI) is employed in the present study to measure the Coronavirus research output by various top countries in the top sub-elds, enabling cross-national comparison is presented in Table 5.  While most prioritized research (RPI >100) on Vaccines (VAC) was found to be conducted by Saudi Arabia followed by Japan, India and USA.

7.6.Language-wise Distribution
The English is largely considered to be the lingua franca of the scienti c community. The study by Weijen (2012) indicated that researchers publishing in English tend to publish most in elds related to the 'harder' Sciences, such as Physics, Engineering and Materials Science than 'softer' Sciences like health and Social Sciences. The results presented in g. 6 also indicate that English with 2507 (98.28%) papers is the most preferred language of scholarly communication. It is followed by a few publications in languages like German, Hungarian, Spanish and French.

7.7.Funding agencies
The   The Table 8 indicates that Journal of Medical Virology was found to be published the highest articles on Coronavirus research with 98 (3.84%) papers. The next four highest numbers of publications were from journals-Viruses-Basel, Nature, Journal of Virology and British Medical Journal. Also, it can be observed that even though the high impact factor and cited journals like Lancet, Nature and British Medical journal appeared in the top in terms of publications on Coronavirus but highest publications were from lower impact factor journals mentioned above.

Findings And Discussion
This study identi ed that the surge in the publications was after the outbreak of the pandemic. The collaborative research has also been observed to be prevalent in intra-and inter-country researches. Where, there is at least an average of 3 authors per joint article. While, Brazil has more quality research output than other countries. The study also highlighted that the paper by Huang, Chaolin For decision makers and emergency personnel confronting this global crisis, quick and timely acquisition of knowledge and statistical based scienti c ndings is important in notifying their policy choices to the optimum via empirical proofs. In order to more accurately direct and empower academic expertise towards more e cient approaches, it also requires a consistent review of existing insight to identify the gaps and overlooked factors. It is believed that this research will help accelerate and enable these scholarly initiatives and bring the awareness of the current research status during this global crisis to the scienti c community. In addition to the usual clinical implications and scienti c output analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic which have so far dominated research publications in this eld, we would like to illustrate a speci c set of ndings related factors like quality, impact, priorities and status of research in Coronaviruses based on recent publications, that have not been included in the other publications of similar scope. Collaborative Index (CI) Figure 5 Relative Quality Index (RQI) Figure 6 Language-wise Distribution