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The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 org/10. /2020 To obtain a unique and omni-comprehensive metric score we calculated the CIS. The association of papers to their corresponding CIS values is published in a spreadsheet, which is available online 3 . The following statistics provide a summary of the recorded CIS values (Figure 2 ): max=5.21, min=-0.21, mean=0.02, median=-0.19. The threshold identified is t=1.04. Such a threshold is the value of the 95% quantile and allows us to record 8 out of 239 papers (Figure 1, Figure 2 ) as potentially more impactful. Lower values for t are not significant for capturing relevant works (as explained in Boetto et al. 2020 ). The resulting 8 most impactful studies' main features are described in Table 3 . Among those, 6 papers are case reports, 1 methodological study, 1 editorial. First authors come from China (n = 6), USA (n=1) and Germany (n=1). The 8 papers' main topics are: case/s description (n=5), outbreak investigation (n=2) and 1 genomic study.