Analysis of the scientific literature in the first 30 Days of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

DAVIDE GORI; Erik Boetto; Maria Pia Fantini

A total of 442 papers were retrieved; 234 articles were found to be pertinent (see Figure 1 ) and read in extenso in order to define their main characteristics. The affiliation of the first authors was distributed among 36 countries: 36.3% of the papers (85 out of 234) had a first author with a Chinese affiliation, 18.4% and 13.7% (43 out of 234 and 32 out of 234) had a first author with an affiliation from UK and USA respectively, while first authors affiliation from Canada accounted for 3.8% of the total (9 out of 234), from Italy for 3% (7 out of 234), and from Australia and Korea both accounted for 2.1% (5 out of 234 each). All the other countries accounted for less than 2% of the first author affiliations (less than 5 out of 234). 63.7% of the papers (149 out of 234) were editorials, commentaries or letters (mainly reported data). 10.7% of the papers (25 out of 234) 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 25.6% (60 out of 234) were original primary studies: among these, case reports accounted for 43.3% of the total, while in vitro or in vivo studies or genomic studies accounted for 21.7% of the total. The remaining primary studies were cohort studies, case control studies and surveys. Chinese first authors published more original data and primary studies than authors from the UK and the USA (32.9% vs 4.7% of the UK and 6.3% of the USA; p<0.001), who published mostly editorials and commentaries. Of note, 61.5% of the analysed papers used reported/non original data and 15.8% used official data. Conversely, only 17.5% of the papers used data which were directly collected on the field. In 5.2% of the papers the source of the data was not clearly specified. The supplementary materials (Table 1) , available online, report all the findings of this review with the reference and description of the 234 papers selected for the bibliometric analysis.