Abstract
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.
Highlights
Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases [1, 2]
A total of 14,141 publications were retrieved, of which around 77.27% were published as original articles, 8.36 % as reviews, 3.91% as proceedings papers, 3.13% as meeting abstracts, with the remaining being book chapters, etc., (Appendix, Supplementary Figure 1)
The research hotpots mainly focused on the mechanisms, pathology, epidemiology, clinical diagnosis, and treatment of the coronavirus in MERS-CoV and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-Cov (Table 5, Appendix, Supplementary Table 6)
Summary
Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases [1, 2]. The appearance of COVID-19 was accelerating such research, which was certainly unique in the history of science and led to an explosion of research output. This output includes many meaningful approaches, but some appear to be excessive and not scientifically sound [9, 10]. Against this background, it is very necessary to think about these compelling questions: Can we learn from previous research patterns regarding CoV? It is very important to know about the global research on CoV in the time before COVID-19
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