Global Scientific Research on Coronavirus : a Scientometric Study

To understand the global research trend of the scientific publication on coronavirus, this scientometric study was carried out for the period 2002 to 2019 based on scientometric indicators such as growth of publication, productive authors and institutions, collaboration among authors and institutions, the hotspot of research area and the citation pattern. A total of 8541 records downloaded from PubMed formed the dataset for the study and were analysed using Bibexcel and VOSviewer. The findings reveal that the research on coronavirus was noticeable but it was not significant. A correlation between the number of publications and emergence of SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012 was also visible. The trend of publication was found to be fluctuating during the period of study. The findings demonstrate that collaboration among institutions was not very strong. Keyword analysis indicates that animals, humans, female, male, mice, molecular sequence data are commonly used