Scientometric Trends for Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Viral Infections

Dima Kagan; Jacob Moran-Gilad; Michael Fire

. CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.17.995795 doi: bioRxiv preprint ing publications in top-10 ranked journals (Figure 7 ). While we can see some correlation to outbreaks in Ebola, swine flu, and SARS, it is harder to interpret the curve of HIV since there were no focused epidemics in the past 20 years but a global burden, and we did not observe similar patterns in publications and citations. Observing the JScore (Section 3.2.2) results (Figure 8 ), most diseases showed a steady increase, but two diseases behaved rather anomalously. MERS had a decline since 2013, which is reasonable to expect after the initial outbreak, but we did not see the same trends in the other diseases and there is a general trend of increasing average SJR [33] . The second anomaly is that SARS had an increase in JScore alongside a decrease in citations and publication numbers. Inspecting the data, we discovered that in 2017 there were three published papers in Lancet Infectious Diseases and in 2015 two papers in Journal of Experimental Medicine about SARS, and both journals have a very high SJR. These publications increased the JScore drastically. Third, we observed that on average authors write a fewer number of multiple papers on diseases that are characterized by large epidemics, such as the swine flu and SARS. On the other side of the scale are hepatitis C and HIV, which are persistent viral diseases with high global burdens. These diseases involve more prolific authors. Regarding Ebola and MERS, it is too early to predict if they will behave similarly to SARS since they are relatively new and require further follow up. Fourth, looking at international collaboration, we observed the US to be very dominant in all the disease studies ( Figure 9 ). Looking at China, we found it to be mainly dominant in diseases that were epidemiologically relevant to public health in China, such as SARS, avian influenza, and hepatitis B. When looking at Ebola, which has not been a threat to China for the last two decades, we observed a relatively low investment in its research in China.