Abstract
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, in addition to the continuous increment in the number of infected patients, the number of COVID-19-related papers has also increased significantly. According to the statistics, its number even exceeds the research of some research fields over many years. Similar to COVID-19, the related research on COVID-19 also seems highly infectious. What causes this situation? By crawling the data of COVID-19-related papers from web of Sciences this year, we found that there are three mechanisms to promote the rapid growth of the number of COVID-19 papers: incentive mechanism, cross-field collaboration mechanism, and potential impact mechanism of writing papers. To understand the impact of COVID-19 on cross-domain paper network further, we proposed a new construction method of multi-field paper association structure network based on COVID-19. The paper association mechanism and the wall breaking principle between multiple research fields were found through the experiments. Then, combined with the constructed network, we gave the knowledge dissemination model of the new discoveries in multiple fields and obtained some relevant new findings.
Highlights
According to the knowledge dissemination model of the new discovery in multiple fields, we present the simulations results to analyze the propagation characteristics of a new discovery related to COVID-19 in the multi-field paper association structure network
Based on the data generated by COVID-19, this paper makes a small supplement to the previous studies and finds three mechanisms that affect the growth of COVID-19 papers: incentive mechanisms, cross-field collaboration mechanism, and potential impact mechanism of writing papers
We found that the production of many COVID-19-related papers breaks the barriers between unrelated fields and further promotes the integration of multiple fields
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, people have done a lot of research related to it [1,2,3]. As of 1 June 2020, 42,700 academic articles have been published around COVID-19 from the statistics of Digital Science [4]. This number even exceeds the sum of research in many research fields. The articles related to COVID-19 cover fields including physics, biology, computer science, medicine, meteorology, geography, etc. What drives researchers to devote themselves to COVID-19-related research is a very interesting question
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