Scientometric Trends for Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Viral Infections

Dima Kagan; Jacob Moran-Gilad; Michael Fire

In this study, we analyzed trends in the research of emerging viruses over the past two decades with emphasis on emerging coronavirus (SARS and MERS). We compared the research of these two coronavirus epidemics to seven other emerging viral infectious diseases as comparators. To this end, we used multiple bibliometric datasets, fusing them to get additional insights. Using this data, we explored the research of epidemiology from the perspectives of papers, journals, authors, and international collaborations. By analyzing the results presented in Section 4, the following can be noted: First, the surge in infectious disease publications (Figure 2 ) supports the results of Fire and Guestrin [33] that found there has been a general escalation of scientific publications. We found that the growth in the number of infectious disease publications is very similar to other fields. Hence, Goodhart's Law 6 did not skip the world of virology research. However, alongside the general growth in the number of papers, we observed that there was a decline in the relative number of papers on the specific infectious diseases we inspected. The most evident drastic drop in the publication rate happened after an epidemic ended. It appears that, for a short while, many researchers study an outbreak, but later their efforts are reduced. This is strengthened by considering the average number of multiple papers per author for each disease (see Table 2 ).