Scientometric Trends for Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Viral Infections

Dima Kagan; Jacob Moran-Gilad; Michael Fire

Many of the trends we observed are related to the pattern of the diseases. We observed two main types of infectious diseases with distinct trends. The first type were emerging viral infections like SARS and Ebola. Their academic outputs tend to peak after an epidemic and then subside. The second type were viral infections with high burdens such hepatitis B and HIV, for which there is a more or less constant trend. These trends were most evident in publication and citation numbers, as well as journal metrics. The collaboration and author distributions were more affected by where the outbreak occurred or where there was a high burden. This study may have several limitations. To analyze the data, we relied on titles to associate papers with diseases. While a title is very important in classifying the topic of a paper, some papers may discuss a disease without mentioning its name in the title. Additionally, there may be false positives; for instance, an acronym might not be recognized as an infectious disease term. An additional limitation is our focus on a limited number of distinct diseases. There are other emerging infections not evaluated herein which could have followed other trends. To deal with some of these limitations, we only analyzed papers that were categorized as medicine and biology papers as a means to reduce false positives. Furthermore, we show that the same trends appeared even when we filtered all the papers by the category of virology (see Figures 9 and 10 ) Finally, we compared papers that were tagged with a meSH term on PubMed to the papers we retrieved using our keyword search of the title. We found that we matched meSH terms with 73% recall.