Abstract
BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has spread at an alarming speed, and effective treatment for the disease is still lacking. The body of evidence on COVID-19 has been increasing at an impressive pace, creating the need for a method to rapidly assess the current knowledge and identify key information. Gold standard methods such as systematic reviews and meta-analyses are regarded unsuitable because they have a narrow scope and are very time consuming.ObjectiveThis study aimed to explore the published scientific literature on COVID-19 and map the research evolution during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsWe performed a PubMed search to analyze the titles, keywords, and abstracts of published papers on COVID-19. We used latent Dirichlet allocation modeling to extract topics and conducted a trend analysis to understand the temporal changes in research for each topic, journal impact factor (JIF), and geographic origin.ResultsBased on our search, we identified 16,670 relevant articles dated between February 14, 2020, and June 1, 2020. Of these, 6 articles were reports from peer-reviewed randomized trials on patients with COVID-19. We identified 14 main research topics, of which the most common topics were health care responses (2812/16,670, 16.86%) and clinical manifestations (1828/16,670, 10.91%). We found an increasing trend for research on clinical manifestations and protective measures and a decreasing trend for research on disease transmission, epidemiology, health care response, and radiology. Publications on protective measures, immunology, and clinical manifestations were associated with the highest JIF. The overall median JIF was 3.7 (IQR 2.6-5.9), and we found that the JIF for these publications declined over time. The top countries producing research were the United States, China, Italy, and the United Kingdom.ConclusionsIn less than 6 months since the novel coronavirus was first detected, a remarkably high number of research articles on COVID-19 have been published. Here, we discuss and present the temporal changes in the available COVID-19 research during the early phase of the pandemic. Our findings may aid researchers and policy makers to form a structured view of the current COVID-19 evidence base and provide further research directions.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was first detected in the Hubei Province in China in December 2019 [1]
We classified the scientific publications on COVID-19 during the early phase of the pandemic into 14 topics
The prevalence for some topics, such as health care response, has decreased over time, the prevalence for some other topics, such as clinical manifestations and protective measures, continues to increase. These findings suggest how research priorities have changed over time and, the topics that researchers consider relevant to study and publish have varied during the course of the pandemic
Summary
The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was first detected in the Hubei Province in China in December 2019 [1]. A rapid assessment of a dynamic research field such as COVID-19, where the body of evidence has been increasing at an impressive pace, requires an approach that is more direct and has a wider scope than that of the current gold standard methods, such as scoping and systematic reviews [8]. The body of evidence on COVID-19 has been increasing at an impressive pace, creating the need for a method to rapidly assess the current knowledge and identify key information. Gold standard methods such as systematic reviews and meta-analyses are regarded unsuitable because they have a narrow scope and are very time consuming. Our findings may aid researchers and policy makers to form a structured view of the current COVID-19 evidence base and provide further research directions
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