Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected daily life throughout the world. The scientific community has globally responded to the pandemic with research on an unprecedented scale to help prevent disease spread and terminate the pandemic, resulting in a proliferation of scientific publications. In this article, the temporal trend of research on COVID-19 is analyzed to describe its development and inform a prediction of its future. Four other viruses are included in the analysis as negative or positive controls to illustrate that the concerns of the general public and/or the interest of the scientific community are major driving forces in the development of research. Our analysis predicts that COVID-19 and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) will be major topics of research until at least 2025. We discuss the implications of our analysis for three sectors of community: researchers, epidemiologists, and young students.
Highlights
The recent outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has imposed an unprecedented and devastating burden on the world,[1] including a serious encumbrance to health care systems.[2]
We have previously demonstrated that the number of publications may be a reliable quantitative measure of the magnitude of research activity of a biological or biomedical science.[3]
To quantitatively investigate the trend of research related to the five viruses (SARS-CoV-2, hepatitis C virus (HCV), HIV, Ebola virus disease (EVD), and Zika virus (ZIKV)), we searched the PubMed database on December 23, 2020
Summary
The recent outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has imposed an unprecedented and devastating burden on the world,[1] including a serious encumbrance to health care systems.[2] Collectively the scientific community has responded to the pandemic by researching the spread of the disease and its causative pathogen, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), in order to understand and terminate the pandemic. These efforts have resulted in a vast amount of publications. We believe it would be worthwhile to analyze the trend of the publications in order to predict the future of research in this area. The method has successfully been applied to various fields such as food sciences,[5] epigenetics,[6] metabolomics,[7] and environmental sciences.[8]
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