Scientometric Trends for Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Viral Infections

Dima Kagan; Jacob Moran-Gilad; Michael Fire

In the current study, we focused on the past emerging coronaviruses (SARS and MERS). Additionally, we also analyzed Ebola virus disease, influenza (seasonal, avian influenza, swine flu), HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C as comparators that represent other important emerging infectious diseases from the past two decades. For these nine diseases, we collected all their aliases, which were added to the set of diseases D and were used as keywords to filter the datasets. To reduce the false-positive rate, we analyzed only papers that, according to the MAG dataset, were in the categories of medicine or biology, and had at least five references. Additionally, to explore the trend in the core categories of infectious disease research, we performed the same analysis on the 2 The SJR indicator is a measure used to assess the prestige of a journal. The measure takes into account the number of citations and the prestige of the source of the citing paper [38] 3 "The Journal Impact Factor quartile is the quotient of a journal's rank in category (X) and the total number of journals in the category (Y), so that (X / Y) = Percentile Rank Z"