Scientometric Trends for Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Viral Infections

Dima Kagan; Jacob Moran-Gilad; Michael Fire

Our results highlight that the earlier human coronaviruses (SARS and MERS) are understudied compared to bloodborne viruses. About 0.47% of virology studies and 7 · 10 −5 % of all studies from the past 20 years involved human coronaviruses, while HIV/AIDS accounts for 8.1% of all virology studies. We observed that, unlike the research in the domain of HIV/AIDS and avian influenza that has been published at a high and steady pace over the last 20 years, SARS was studied at an overwhelming rate after the 2002-2003 outbreak and then sharply dropped after 2005 ( Figure 4) . Additionally, we noticed that the SARS research community had a smaller percentage of relatively prolific researchers than other diseases. Moreover, researchers with multiple papers related to SARS published on average 3.8 papers, while hepatitis C researchers published on average 5.2 papers during the same period. When it comes to global collaboration and research efforts, most of the research stemmed from China and the US (Figure 1 ) with only about 17% of SARS papers' first authors being located in Europe. Overall, researchers from 57 and 67 countries have studied MERS and SARS, respectively. However, the vast majority of SARS papers (73%) were written by researchers in only 6 countries ( Figure 9) .