A Bibliometric Analysis of PubMed Literature on Middle East Respiratory Syndrome

Scientometric analysis of kidney disease and gut microbiota from 2001 to 2020 based on Web of Science

This study aims to demonstrate current research priorities and predict future trends in the link between kidney disease and gut microbiota by means of scientometric analysis. We collected nearly 20 years (2001-2020) of publications related to kidney disease and gut microbiota in the Web of Science database. CiteSpace was used to evaluate the knowledge mapping. There are 965 manuscripts about kidney disease and gut microbiota in total, and faster growth after 2016. The country, institution, and author who posted the most are the USA, Univ Calif Irvine, and DENISE MAFRA, respectively. The frequencies are 109, 16, and 17. The most important of them are FRANCE (0.23), Fed Univ Parana UFPR (0.13), and VAZIRI ND (1.14), owing to their highest centrality. In addition, the cited documents that have contributed the most to the co-citations are Wong J (2014); the most key cited reference is Rossi M (2016); the most commonly used keywords are chronic kidney disease, gut microbiota and indoxyl sulfate. Through scientometric analysis of the past 20 years, we obtained the knowledge map of this information, which has important guiding significance for accurately and quickly locating trends in this field.

Bibliometric analysis of studies on the treatment of hemifacial spasm

Objective

Hemifacial spasm (HFS) is a common neurological disorder of the brain, which is difficult to treat. Most patients are distracted by it and are unable to work or study normally, which seriously affects their physical and mental health. However, there are a few bibliometric studies on it. This paper searched the articles on HFS using a bibliometric approach.

Method

Articles about HFS were retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database. We employed the Visualization of Similarities (VOS)viewer to analyze these publications.

Results

A total of 645 reviews or articles in English were retrieved from WoS. In this study, we found that the number of publications showed a rising trend and China is the most active in searching the treatment of HFS. About keywords, neurosciences and neurology was searched (422 times) keyword, followed by hemifacial spasm (420 times) and surgery (320 times). By assessing the organizations, Shanghai Jiao Tong University published the most papers (8.68%), followed by Sungkyunkwan University (3.26%) and Baylor College Medicine (2.64%). A total of 247 journals have delivered publications on the treatment of HFS, World Neurosurgery (44 papers) published the largest number of articles.

Conclusion

The annual publications have increased with a fluctuating tendency. More researchers were taking an interest in HFS. This study helped us find out the hotspot and trend in research about facial spasm treatment.

Global research trends in MERS-CoV: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis from 2012 to 2021

Background

The Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. So far, the cases of MERS-CoV have been reported in 27 countries. The virus causes severe health complications, resulting high mortality.

Aim

The current study aimed to evaluate the global research trends and key bibliometric indices in MERS-CoV research from 2012 to 2021.

Methods

A retrospective bibliometric and visualized study was conducted. The Science Citation Index Expanded Edition of Web of Science Core Collection database was utilized to retrieve published scientific literature on MERS-CoV. The retrieved publications were assessed for a number of bibliometric attributes. The data were imported into HistCite^TM and VOSviewer software to calculate the citations count and perform the visualization mapping, respectively. In addition, countries or regions collaboration, keywords analysis, and trend topics in MERS-CoV were assessed using the Bibliometrix: An R-tool.

Results

A total of 1,587 publications, published in 499 journals, authored by 6,506 authors from 88 countries or regions were included in the final analysis. Majority of these publications were published as research article (n = 1,143). Globally, these publications received 70,143 citations. The most frequent year of publication was 2016 (n = 253), while the most cited year was 2014 (11,517 citations). The most prolific author was Memish ZA (n = 94), while the most published journal was Emerging Infectious Diseases (n = 80). The United States of America (USA) (n = 520) and Saudi Arabia (n = 432) were the most influential and largest contributors to the MERS-CoV publications. The extensively studied research area was infectious diseases. The most frequently used author keywords other than search keywords were Saudi Arabia, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, epidemiology, transmission, spike protein, vaccine, outbreak, camel, and pneumonia.

Conclusion

This study provides an insight into MERS-CoV-related research for scientific community (researchers, academicians) to understand and expand the basic knowledge structure, potential collaborations, and research trend topics. This study can also be useful for policy makers. After the emergence of MERS-CoV, a significant increase in scientific production was observed in the next 4 years (2013–2016). In 2021, the trend topics in MERS-CoV-related research were COVID-19, clinical characteristics, and cytokine storm. Saudi Arabia had the strongest collaboration with the USA, while the USA had the highest collaboration with China.

Coronavirus

Coronaviruses (CoVs) are a large family of viruses and are endemic in humans and animals, causing respiratory and intestinal infections. CoV has become a challenge in China region due to its recent outbreak at the start of the year 2020. The current outbreak of CoV disease has resulted in many fatalities and has forced the people of Wuhan Province in China to remain confined in their homes. Two other two forms of CoVs were epidemic in 2003 when the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) spread in Hong Kong and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) spread in the Middle East region. This scientometric study is an attempt to trace the trends of research associated with “Coronavirus” for a period of 32 years using the Web of Science citation database. The database was searched on February 26, 2020, for CoV publications published from 1989 to 2020. Identified and analyzed parameters include year of publication, publication type, patterns of international collaboration, research institutions, journals, impact factor, h-index, language, and the number of times cited. Most of the research publications were from the United States (35,871), and the University of Hong Kong was the most productive institute (517, 4.10% publications). The Journal of Virology has published the most number of articles on CoV.

Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Review of Global Coronavirus Research Trends Before COVID-19: Prospects and Implications for COVID-19 Research

Coronaviruses (CoV) cause respiratory and intestinal infections. We conducted this bibliometric analysis and systematical review to explore the CoV-related research trends from before COVID-19. We systematically searched the Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid Embase, and Web of Science (WOS) databases for published bibliometric analyses of CoV from database inception to January 24, 2021. The WOS Collection was searched from inception to January 31, 2020, to acquire the CoV-related publications before COVID-19. One-Way ANOVA and Bonferroni multiple-comparison tests were used to compare differences. Visualization mapping and keyword cluster graphs were made to illustrate the research topics and hotpots. We included 14,141 CoV-related publications for the bibliometric analysis and 16 (12 articles) CoV-related bibliometric analyses for the systematic review. Both the systematic review and bibliometric analysis showed (1) the number of publications showed two steep upward trajectories in 2003-2004 and in 2012-2014; (2) the research hotpots mainly focused on the mechanism, pathology, epidemiology, clinical diagnosis, and treatment of the coronavirus in MERS-CoV and SARS-Cov; (3) the USA, and China; the University of Hong Kong; and Yuen KY, came from the University of Hong Kong contributed most; (4) the Journal of Virology had the largest number of CoV related studies. More studies should focus on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment in the future.

Sub-Saharan African Countries‘ COVID-19 Research: An analysis of the External and Internal Contributions, Collaboration Patterns and Funding Sources

This study aims at providing some evidence-based insight into Sub-Saharan Africa’s first eighteen months of COVID-19 research by evaluating its research contributions, patterns of collaboration, and funding sources. Eighteen months (2020 January 1-2021 June 30) COVID-19 publication data of 46 Sub-Saharan African countries was collected from Scopus for analysis. Country of affiliation of the authors and funding agencies data was analyzed to understand country contributions, collaboration pattern and funding sources. USA (23.08%) and the UK (19.63%), the top two external contributors, collaborated with Sub-Saharan African countries about three times more than other countries. Collaborative papers between Sub-Saharan African countries - without contributions from outside the region- made up less than five per cent of the sample, whereas over 50% of the papers were written in collaboration with researchers from outside the region. Organizations that are in the USA and the UK funded 45% of all the COVID-19 research from Sub-Saharan Africa. 53.44% of all the funding from Sub-Saharan African countries came from South African organizations. This study provides evidence that pan-African COVID-19 research collaboration is low, perhaps due to poor funding and lack of institutional support within Sub-Saharan Africa. This mirrors the collaborative features of science in Sub-Saharan Africa before the COVID-19 pandemic. The high volume of international collaboration during the pandemic is a good development. There is also a strong need to forge more robust pan-African research collaboration networks, through funding from Africa’s national and regional government organizations, with the specific objective of meeting local COVID-19 and other healthcare needs.

Mapping coronavirus research: quantitative and visualization approaches

Purpose

The present study aims to measure the global research landscape on coronavirus indexed in the Web of Science from 1989 to 2020. The study examines growth rates, authorship trends, institutional productivity, collaborative networks and prominent authors, institutions and countries.

Design/methodology/approach

The research literature on coronavirus published globally and indexed in the Web of Science core collection was retrieved using the term “Coronavirus” and its related and synonymous terms (e.g. COVID-19, SARS-COV, SARS-COV-2 and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus) as per the Medical List of Subject Headings. A total of 5,625 publications were retrieved; however, the study was restricted to articles only (i.e. 4,471), and other document types were excluded. Quantitative and visualization techniques were used for data analysis and interpretation. VOSViewer software was employed to map collaborative networks of authors, institutions and countries.

Findings

A total of 4,471 articles have been published on coronavirus by 99 countries of the world with the maximum contribution from the USA, followed by the People's Republic of China. The United States, China, Canada, Netherlands and Germany are the front runners in the collaborative network and form strong sub-networks with other countries as well. More than 1,000 institutions collaborate in the field of coronavirus research among 99 contributing countries. The authorship pattern shows that 97.5% of publications are contributed by authors in collaboration in which 77.5% of publications are contributed by four or more than four authors. The range between degree of collaboration (DC) varies from 0.89 in 1993 to 1 in 2000 with an average of 0.96 from 1989 to 2020. The results confirm that the coronavirus research is carried out in teamwork at the individual, institutional and global levels with high magnitude and density of collaboration. The relative growth of the literature has shown inconsistency as a decreasing trend has been observed from 2007 onwards, thereby increasing the doubling time from 4.2 in the first ten years to 17.3 in the last ten years.

Research limitations

The study is limited to the publications indexed in the Web of Science; the findings cannot be generalized across other databases.

Practical implications

The results of the study may help medical scientists to identify the progress in COVID-19 research. Besdies, it will help to identify the prolific authors, institutions and countries in the development of research.

Social implications

The current COVID-19 pandemic poses urgent and prolonged threats to the health and well-being of the population worldwide. It has not only attacked the health of the people but the economy of nations as well. Therefore, it is feasible to know the research landscape of the disease to conquer the problem.

Originality/value

The current COVID-19 pandemic poses urgent and prolonged threats to the health and well-being of the population worldwide. It has not only attacked the health of the people but also the economy of nations as well. Therefore, it is feasible to know the research landscape of the disease to conquer the problem.

Measuring the funding landscape of COVID-19 research

Purpose

The purpose of the study is to map the funding status of COVID-19 research. The various aspects, such as funding ratio, geographical distribution of funded articles, journals publishing funded research and institutions that sponsor the COVID-19 research are studied. To visualize the country collaboration network and research trends/hotspots in the field of COVID-19 funded research, keyword analysis is also performed. The open-access (OA) status of the funded research on COVID-19 is also discussed.

Design/methodology/approach

The leading indexing and abstracting database, i.e. Web of Science (WoS), was used to retrieve the funded articles published on the topic COVID-19. The scientometric approach, more particularly “funding acknowledgment analysis (FAA),” was used to study the research funding.

Findings

A total of 5,546 publications of varied nature have been published on COVID-19, of which 1,760 are funded, thus indicating a funding ratio of 32%. China is the leading producer of funded research (760, 43.182%) on COVID-19 followed by the USA (482, 27.386%), England (179, 10.17%), Italy (119, 6.761%), Germany (107, 6.08%) and Canada (107, 6.08%). China is also in lead in terms of the funding ratio (60.94%). However, the funding ratio of the USA (31.54%) is at 11th rank behind Canada (40.68%), Germany (34.18%) and England (35.87%). The USA occupies a central position in the collaboration network having the highest score of articles with other countries (n = 489), with the USA–China collaboration ranking first (n = 123). National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) is the largest source of funding for COVID-19 research, supporting 342 (19.432%) publications, followed by the United States Department of Health Human Services (DHHS) and National Institute of Health (NIH), USA with 211 (11.989%) and 200 (11.364%) publications, respectively. However, China's National Key Research and Development Program achieves the highest citation impact (80.24) for its funded publications. Journal of Medical Virology, Science of the Total Environment and EuroSurveillance are the three most prolific journals publishing 63 (3.58%), 35 (1.989%) and 32 (1.818%), respectively, of the sponsored research articles on the COVID-19. A total of 3,138 institutions produce funded articles with Huazhong University of Science Technology and Wuhan University from China at the forefront publishing 92 (5.227%) and 83 (4.716%) publications, respectively. The funded research on COVID-19 is largely available in OA mode (1,674, 95.11%) and mainly through the Green and Bronze routes. The keyword clustering reveals that the articles mainly focus on the impact, structure and clinical characteristics of the virus.

Research limitations/implications

The study's main limitation is that the results are based on the publications indexed by WoS, which has limited coverage compared to other databases. Moreover, all the funding agencies do not require or authors miss to acknowledge funding sources in their publications, which ultimately undermines the number of funded publications. The research publications on COVID-19 are also proliferating; thus, the study's findings shall be valid for a minimum period.

Practical implications

The funding of research on the COVID-19 is highly essential to accelerate innovative research and help countries fight against the global pandemic. The study's findings reflect the efforts made by nations and institutions to remove the financial and accessibility hurdles. It not only underscores the lead of the USA in the research on COVID-19, but also shows China as a forerunner in sponsoring the research, thus, helping to know the contribution of nations toward understanding the dynamics of pandemic and controlling it. The study will help healthcare practitioners and policymakers recognize the areas that remain the focus of sponsored research on COVID-19 and other left-out areas that need to be taken up and thus may help in policy formulation. It further highlights the impact of prolific funding agencies so that efforts may be initiated to increase the impact and thereby the returns of investment. The study can help to map the scientific structure of COVID-19 through the lens of funded research and recognize core inclinations of its development. Overall, a comprehensive analysis has been performed to present the detailed characteristics of sponsored research on emerging area of COVID-19, and it is informative, useful and one of its kind on the theme.

Originality/value

The study explores the funding support of research on COVID-19 and its other aspects, along with the mode of availability.

Medical negligence in healthcare organizations and its impact on patient safety and public health: a bibliometric study

Background: Medical negligence is an increasing public health concern among healthcare providers worldwide as it affects patient safety. It poses a significant risk of patient injury, disease, disability, or death. The WHO has recognized deficiencies in patient safety as a global healthcare issue to be addressed. This study aimed to analyze various components of medical negligence research literature. Methods: Bibliographic data visualizations tools like Biblioshiny (RStudio) and VOSviewer were used besides MS Excel to examine the types of documents, annual scientific production, top contributing authors and their impact, authorship patterns and collaboration, top contributing countries and organizations, most significant sources of publication, most cited documents, and most frequently used keywords. Bibliometric methods were used to analyze the bibliographic records of research output on medical negligence downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection. Results: The annual productivity of medical negligence research was increasing gradually. The most productive period for medical negligence research was 2011-2020. Bird contributed the highest number of publications to medical negligence literature while Brennan emerged as the highly cited author. Single-authored publications on medical negligence were not highly cited. The United States was the highest contributing country and the University of South Florida was the highest contributing organization while Harvard University was a highly cited organization. Nine out of the top ten contributing organizations were academic institutions and most of them belonged to the United States. The most important sources of publication on this topic were The Lancet and British Medical Journal. Localio et al. was the most important research article on medical negligence research. Conclusion: Due to increasing attention on this topic, there was a sharp increase in the research output on medical negligence. This is of significance as the WHO set in motion a patient safety program almost two decades ago.

A scientometric analysis on coronaviruses research (1900-2020): Time for a continuous, cooperative and global approach

Infectious diseases remain a complex, recurring, and challenging public health hazard. Coronaviruses have led to multidimensional consequences on health, mobility, and socio-economic conditions. Despite the significance and magnitude of impact from epidemics to the pandemic, literature is sparse on comprehensive coronaviruses related research performance over time. This study aimed at a scientometric evaluation of coronaviruses related literature including COVID-19. Data related to Coronavirus research was extracted from the Web of Science (WoS). All types of publications (28,846) were included and retrieved. To measure the quantity and quality of the publications, "R-Bibliometrix" package was used for detailed analysis exploring a wide range of indicators. Generally, an increasing trend was observed over time led by the USA and China followed by the United Kingdom, Europe, and few other developed countries. The last two decades contributed around 39.5% of documents while only 06 months of 2020 additionally contributed around 46.5% of total documents. Earlier shorter spikes of increased post epidemic publications followed by decreased productivity were detected in the last 2 decades and showed a lack of continuity-'a research epidemic following a disease epidemic'. Articles (53.4%) were the most common publication type. Journal of Virology, British Medical Journal (BMJ), and Virology were leading sources while BMJ, and Lancet showed increased contributions recently. Overall, similar trends of top authors were observed in terms of productivity, impact, collaborations, funding sources, and affiliations with few exceptions mainly from affected regions. Top 20 countries contributed >89% of documents suggesting a lack of global efforts. Networking was found to be mainly among developed nations with limited contributions from resource-limited countries perhaps requiring more cooperation. Recent post-COVID publications rise is highest, unprecedented, and rapidly growing. Authors strongly recommend recent COVID-19 pandemic as a call for continuous, more cooperative, and collective global research.

Knowledge Mapping of Acupuncture for Cancer Pain: A Scientometric Analysis (2000-2019)

Objective

This study aimed to demonstrate the state of the present situation and trends concerning the global use of acupuncture for cancer pain in the past 20 years.

Methods

Searched the Web of Science database from 2000 to 2019 related to acupuncture for cancer pain, and then used CiteSpace to conduct scientometric analysis to acquire the knowledge mapping.

Results

Yearly output has increased year by year, and the growth rate has become faster after 2012. According to the cluster analysis of institutions, authors, cited references, and keywords, 4, 4, 15, and 14 categories were obtained, respectively. The most productive countries, institutions, and authors are the USA, Mem Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Mao JJ, whose frequencies are 196, 24, and 17, respectively. However, the most important of them are Australia, Univ. Maryland, and Bao T, owing to their highest centrality, they are 0.90, 0.21, and 0.09 separately. Moreover, cited references that contributed to the most co-citations are Crew KD (2010), however, the most key cited reference is Roscoe JA (2003). Keywords such as acupuncture, pain, breast cancer, palliative care, and quality of life are the most frequently used. But auricular acupuncture is the crucial keyword. In the cluster analysis of institutions, authors, cited references, and keywords, the more convincing research categories are multiple myeloma, placebo effect, neck malignancies, and early breast cancer, with S values of 0.990, 0.991, 0.990, and 0.923, respectively. Therefore, they can be regarded as research hotspots in this field.

Conclusion

Based on the scientometric analysis in the past 20 years, the knowledge mapping of the country, institution, author, cited reference, and the keyword is gained, which has an important guiding significance for quickly and accurately positioning the trend in this field.

Temporal evolution, most influential studies and sleeping beauties of the coronavirus literature

Following the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 disease, within less than 8 months, the 50 years-old scholarly literature of coronaviruses grew to nearly three times larger than its size prior to 2020. Here, temporal evolution of the coronavirus literature over the last 30 years (N = 43,769) is analysed along with its subdomain of SARS-CoV-2 articles (N = 27,460) and the subdomain of reviews and meta-analytic studies (N = 1027). The analyses are conducted through the lenses of co-citation and bibliographic coupling of documents. (1) Of the N = 1204 review and meta-analytical articles of the coronavirus literature, nearly 88% have been published and indexed during the first 8 months of 2020, marking an unprecedented attention to reviews and meta-analyses in this domain, prompted by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. (2) The subset of 2020 SARS-CoV-2 articles is bibliographically distant from the rest of this literature published prior to 2020. Individual articles of the SARS-CoV-2 segment with a bridging role between the two bodies of articles (i.e., before and after 2020) are identifiable. (3) Furthermore, the degree of bibliographic coupling within the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 cluster is much poorer compared to the cluster of articles published prior to 2020. This could, in part, be explained by the higher diversity of topics that are studied in relation to SARS-CoV-2 compared to the literature of coronaviruses published prior to the SARS-CoV-2 disease. (4) The analyses on the subset of SARS-CoV-2 literature identified studies published prior to 2020 that have now proven highly instrumental in the development of various clusters of publications linked to SARS-CoV-2. In particular, the so-called "sleeping beauties" of the coronavirus literature with an awakening in 2020 were identified, i.e., previously published studies of this literature that had remained relatively unnoticed for several years but gained sudden traction in 2020 in the wake of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. This work documents the historical development of the literature on coronaviruses as an event-driven literature and as a domain that exhibited, arguably, the most exceptional case of publication burst in the history of science. It also demonstrates how scholarly efforts undertaken during peace time or prior to a disease outbreak could suddenly play a critical role in prevention and mitigation of health disasters caused by new diseases.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-021-04036-4.

Coronavirus mapping in scientific publications: When science advances rapidly and collectively, is access to this knowledge open to society?

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating a global health emergency. Mapping this health emergency in scientific publications demands multiple approaches to obtain a picture as complete as possible. To progress in the knowledge of this pandemic and to control its effects, international collaborations between researchers are essentials, as well as having open and immediate access to scientific publications, what we called "coopetition". Our main objectives are to identify the most productive countries in coronavirus publications, to analyse the international scientific collaboration on this topic, and to study the proportion and typology of open accessibility to these publications. We have analyzed 18,875 articles indexed in Web of Science. We performed the descriptive statistical analysis in order to explore the performance of the more prolific countries and organizations, as well as paying attention to the last 2 years. Registers have been analyzed separately via the VOSviewer software, drawing a network of links among countries and organizations to identify the starred countries and organizations, and the strongest links of the net. We have explored the capacity of researchers to generate scientific knowledge about a health crisis emergency, and their global capacity to collaborate among them in a global emergency. We consider that science is moving rapidly to find solutions to international health problems but access to this knowledge by society is not so quick due to several limitations (open access policies, corporate interests, etc.). We have observed that papers from China in the last 3 months (from January 2020 to March 2020) have a strong impact compared with papers published in years before. The United States and China are the major producers of documents of our sample, followed by all European countries, especially the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. At the same time, the leading role of Saudi Arabia, Canada or South Korea should be noted, with a significant number of documents submitted but very different dynamics of international collaboration. The proportion of international collaboration is growing in all countries in 2019-2020, which contrasts with the situation of the last two decades. The organizations providing the most documents to the sample are mostly Chinese. The percentage of open access articles on coronavirus for the period 2001-2020 is 59.2% but if we focus in 2020 the figures increase up to 91.4%, due to the commitment of commercial publishers with the emergency.

A Bibliometric Review of Artificial Extracellular Matrices Based on Tissue Engineering Technology Literature: 1990 through 2019

Artificial extracellular matrices (aECMs) are an extension of biomaterials that were developed as in-vitro model environments for tissue cells that mimic the native in vivo target tissues’ structure. This bibliometric analysis evaluated the research productivity regarding aECM based on tissue engineering technology. The Web of Science citation index was examined for articles published from 1990 through 2019 using three distinct aECM-related topic sets. Data were also visualized using network analyses (VOSviewer). Terms related to in-vitro, scaffolds, collagen, hydrogels, and differentiation were reoccurring in the aECM-related literature over time. Publications with terms related to a clinical direction (wound healing, stem cells, artificial skin, in-vivo, and bone regeneration) have steadily increased, as have the number of countries and institutions involved in the artificial extracellular matrix. As progress with 3D scaffolds continues to advance, it will become the most promising technology to provide a therapeutic option to repair or replace damaged tissue.

Time to Acceptance of 3 Days for Papers About COVID-19

Time to acceptance from submission and time to publication (publication lag) determines how quickly novel information is made available to other scientists and experts. In the medical field, the review process and revisions usually takes 3–4 months; the total time from submission to publication is 8–9 months. During the COVID-19 pandemic, information should be available much faster. The analysis of 833 documents published on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 prior to 19 March 2020 shows that these times shrunk by a factor of ten. The median time to acceptance was three days for all publications, six days for research papers and reviews, four days for case studies and two days for other publication types. The median publication lag was nine days for all publications together, 11 days for research papers, nine days for case studies, 13 days for reviews and seven days for other publications. This demonstrates that the publication process—if necessary—can be sped up. For the sake of scientific accuracy, review times should not be pushed down, but the time from acceptance to actual publication could be shorter.

Research Progress of Coronavirus Based on Bibliometric Analysis

Background: COVID-19 has become one of the most serious global epidemics in the 21st Century. This study aims to explore the distribution of research capabilities of countries, institutions, and researchers, and the hotspots and frontiers of coronavirus research in the past two decades. In it, references for funding support of urgent projects and international cooperation among research institutions are provided. Method: the Web of Science core collection database was used to retrieve the documents related to coronavirus published from 2003 to 2020. Citespace.5.6.R2, VOSviewer1.6.12, and Excel 2016 were used for bibliometric analysis. Results: 11,036 documents were retrieved, of which China and the United States have contributed the most coronavirus studies, Hong Kong University being the top contributor. Regarding journals, the Journal of Virology has contributed the most, while in terms of researchers, Yuen Kwok Yung has made the most contributions. The proportion of documents published by international cooperation has been rising for decades. Vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 are under development, and clinical trials of several drugs are ongoing. Conclusions: international cooperation is an important way to accelerate research progress and achieve success. Developing corresponding vaccines and drugs are the current hotspots and research directions.

Twenty-Year Span of Global Coronavirus Research Trends: A Bibliometric Analysis

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic aroused global public concern and became a major medical issue. This study aims to investigate the global research routine and trends of coronavirus over the last twenty years based on the production, hotspots, and frontiers of published articles as well as to provide the global health system with a bibliometric reference. The Web of Science core collection database was retrieved for coronavirus articles published from 1 January 2000 to 17 March 2020. Duplicates and discrete papers were excluded. Analysis parameters including time, regions, impact factors, and citation times were processed through professional software. A total of 9043 coronavirus articles originated from 123 countries and were published in 1202 journals. The USA contributed most articles (3101) followed by China (2230). The research was published in specialized journals including the Journal of Virology. Universities were the main institutions of science progress. High-impact articles covered fields of basic science and clinical medicine. There were two sharp increases in research yields after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreaks. International collaborations promoted study progress, and universities and academies act as the main force in coronavirus research. More research on prevention and treatment is needed according to an analysis of term density.

COVID-19 will stimulate a new coronavirus research breakthrough: a 20-year bibliometric analysis

Background

COVID-19 is currently rampant in China, causing unpredictable harm to humans. This study aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively investigate the research trends on coronaviruses using bibliometric analysis to identify new prevention strategies.

Methods

All relevant publications on coronaviruses were extracted from 2000–2020 from the Web of Science database. An online analysis platform of literature metrology, bibliographic item co-occurrence matrix builder (BICOMB) and CiteSpace software were used to analyse the publication trends. VOSviewer was used to analyse the keywords and research hotspots and compare COVID-19 information with SARS and MERS information.

Results

We found a total of 9,760 publications related to coronaviruses published from 2000 to 2020. The Journal of Virology has been the most popular journal in this field over the past 20 years. The United States maintained a top position worldwide and has provided a pivotal influence, followed by China. Among all the institutions, the University of Hong Kong was regarded as a leader for research collaboration. Moreover, Professors Yuen KY and Peiris JSM made great achievements in coronavirus research. We analysed the keywords and identified 5 coronavirus research hotspot clusters.

Conclusions

We considered the publication information regarding different countries, institutions, authors, journals, etc. by summarizing the literature on coronaviruses over the past 20 years. We analysed the studies on COVID-19 and the SARS and MERS coronaviruses. Notably, COVID-19 must become the research hotspot of coronavirus research, and clinical research on COVID-19 may be the key to defeating this epidemic.

Trends and Features of the Applications of Natural Language Processing Techniques for Clinical Trials Text Analysis

Natural language processing (NLP) is an effective tool for generating structured information from unstructured data, the one that is commonly found in clinical trial texts. Such interdisciplinary research has gradually grown into a flourishing research field with accumulated scientific outputs available. In this study, bibliographical data collected from Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus databases from 2001 to 2018 had been investigated with the use of three prominent methods, including performance analysis, science mapping, and, particularly, an automatic text analysis approach named structural topic modeling. Topical trend visualization and test analysis were further employed to quantify the effects of the year of publication on topic proportions. Topical diverse distributions across prolific countries/regions and institutions were also visualized and compared. In addition, scientific collaborations between countries/regions, institutions, and authors were also explored using social network analysis. The findings obtained were essential for facilitating the development of the NLP-enhanced clinical trial texts processing, boosting scientific and technological NLP-enhanced clinical trial research, and facilitating inter-country/region and inter-institution collaborations.

Global Research on Syndromic Surveillance from 1993 to 2017: Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization

Syndromic Surveillance aims at analyzing medical data to detect clusters of illness or forecast disease outbreaks. Although the research in this field is flourishing in terms of publications, an insight of the global research output has been overlooked. This paper aims at analyzing the global scientific output of the research from 1993 to 2017. To this end, the paper uses bibliometric analysis and visualization to achieve its goal. Particularly, a data processing framework was proposed based on citation datasets collected from Scopus and Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). The bibliometric method and Citespace were used to analyze the institutions, countries, and research areas as well as the current hotspots and trends. The preprocessed dataset includes 14,680 citation records. The analysis uncovered USA, England, Canada, France and Australia as the top five most productive countries publishing about Syndromic Surveillance. On the other hand, at the Pinnacle of academic institutions are the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The reference co-citation analysis uncovered the common research venues and further analysis of the keyword cooccurrence revealed the most trending topics. The findings of this research will help in enriching the field with a comprehensive view of the status and future trends of the research on Syndromic Surveillance.

Chinese research into severe ulcerative colitis has increased in quantity and complexity

AIM

To investigate the current state of research output from Chinese studies into severe ulcerative colitis (SUC) using a bibliometric analysis of publications.

METHODS

The contents of the Chinese periodical databases WANFANG, VIP, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure were searched for all papers regarding UC or SUC published in last the 15 years (from 2001 to 2015). The number of publications in each year was recorded to assess the temporal trends of research output. All SUC related publications were downloaded and the complexity of this research was evaluated with methods described previously. The number of patients with SUC reported each year was recorded and their clinical characteristics were analyzed using information available in the relevant papers.

RESULTS

There were 13499 publications regarding UC published in Chinese medical journals between 2001 and 2015, of which 201 focused on SUC. The number of publications increased rapidly with more than half of all papers being published in the most recent 5-year period. There was a significant increase in analytical studies and clinical trials over the study period (P < 0.01), with research into the management of SUC, included pharmacotherapy, nutrition support as well as surgery, predominating. Almost half (46.2%) of the observational analytical studies and clinical trials focused on Traditional Chinese Medicine, with little research on the efficacy of cyclosporin and infliximab in disease management. About 6222 patients with SUC were reported in the 201 SUC relevant papers, with a ratio of male/female of 1.38. The number of patients reported in each 5-year period significantly increased. The colectomy rate and short-term mortality rate were 7.7% and 0.8% respectively. The most commonly employed operation was total proctocolectomy with ileal pouch-anal anastomosis.

CONCLUSION

The output and complexity of research related to SUC in China increased significantly over the previous 15 years, however few of these studies focused on salvage therapy.