The impact of early scientific literature in response to COVID-19: a scientometric perspective

Davide Golinelli; Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese; Erik Boetto; Flavia Rallo; Manfredi Greco; Fabrizio Toscano; Maria Pia Fantini

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10. 1101 The search conducted yielded 442 potentially relevant papers. After deduplication and pertinence screening, 239 papers met the eligibility criteria for review and scientometric analysis (Figure 1 ). 63.6% of the papers (152 out of 239) were editorials, commentaries or letters (mainly reported data). 10.5% of the papers (25 out of 239) were secondary papers, mainly narrative reviews, which collected the knowledge available up to that point on some specific topics (i.e. genomics of the virus, transmissibility, etc.). The remaining 25.9% (62 out of 239) were original primary studies: among these, case reports accounted for 42%, while in vitro or in vivo studies or genomic studies accounted for 21% of the total. The remaining primary studies were cohort studies, case control studies and surveys.