Scientometric Trends for Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Viral Infections

Dima Kagan; Jacob Moran-Gilad; Michael Fire

In recent years, there has been a surge in publications about infectious diseases, yielding almost 2 million new papers related to medicine and biology each year (see Figure 2a) . In contrast to the overall growth in the number of infectious disease papers, there has been a relative decline in the number of papers about the coronaviruses SARS and MERS (see Figure 2b) . Generally, new EIDs such as MERS, SARS and Ebola has low number of papers while HIV, Influenza, Hepatitis B and C are extremely popular research topic (Figure 3) . Also, we found that in the past 16 years, only 0.7% of infectious disease studies were about SARS and MERS. It can be observed that HIV alone is responsible for 20% of all studies, and hepatitis B and C together are holding 8.2% of all infectious disease studies. In terms of Normalized Paper Rate (see Figure 4 ), after the first SARS outbreak, there was a peak in publishing SARS-related papers with NPR twice as high as Ebola's. However, the trend dropped very quickly, and a similar phenomenon can be observed for the swine flu pandemic. The MERS outbreak achieved a much lower NPR than SARS, specifically more than 16 times lower when comparing the peaks in SARS and MERS trends. In terms of Normalized Citation Rate (Figure 5) , we observed the same phenomenon as we did with NPR.