Abstract
This article aimed to give the visibility of Latin American researchers’ contributions to the comprehension of COVID-19; our method was a literature review. Currently, the world is facing a health and socioeconomic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and its disease COVID-19. Therefore, in less than 4 months, researchers have published a significant number of articles related to this novel virus. For instance, a search focused on the Scopus database on 10 April 2020, showed 1,224 documents published by authors with 1,797 affiliations from 80 countries. A total of 25.4%, 24.0% and 12.6% of these national affiliations were from China, Europe and the USA, respectively, making these regions leaders in COVID-19 research. In the case of Latin America, on 10 April 2020, we searched different databases, such as Scopus, PubMed and Web of Science, finding that the contribution of this region was 2.7 ± 0.6% of the total publications found. In other words, we found 153 publications related to COVID-19 with at least one Latin American researcher. We summarized and processed the information from these 153 publications, finding active participation in topics like medical, social and environmental considerations, bioinformatics and epidemiology.
Highlights
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a novel virus that mainly affects the respiratory system through the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (Ciotti et al., 2020)
A search focused on the Scopus database on 22 April 10, 2020, showed 1224 documents published by authors with 1797 affiliations from 80 23 countries. 25.4%, 24.0%, and 12.6% of these national affiliations were from China, Europe, and 24 the USA, respectively, making these regions leaders in COVID-19 research
We found 153 publications related to COVID-19 with at least one Latin 28 American researcher
Summary
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a novel virus that mainly affects the respiratory system through the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (Ciotti et al., 2020). Latin America is no stranger to this reality, totaling approximately 100,000 cases and 5,500 deaths, as shown in Table 1 (Johns Hopkins University, 2020) These data may be lower than actual numbers because the number of tests per million inhabitants remains low, which is caused by factors such as the limited availability of tests and the difficulty of monitoring people without facilities like indigenous populations, vulnerable groups, and Venezuelan refugees (Oliveira et al, 2020; Torres & Sacoto, 2020). In the past, during SARS and MERS outbreaks, research focused on coronaviruses increased significantly, which was led by researchers from China and the USA (Bonilla-Aldana et al, 2020b) This new outbreak is not an exception because thousands of articles have been published in less than four months, where China, Europe, and the USA are leaders in the number of publications. The relevance of this review focused on finding the research interests of Latin American researchers according to global and regional priorities
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