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

DAVIDE GORI; Erik Boetto; Maria Pia Fantini

We searched MEDLINE (PubMed) electronic database in order to find all relevant studies. After a preliminary search starting from 1 December 2019, we found out that the first article meeting our inclusion criteria was published on 14 January 2020. [15] [Supplementary materials, Table 1 , ID: 1] We subsequently extended our research to the first 30 days after this milestone article, up to 13 January 2020. We decided to scan the reference lists of the reviews retrieved in order to find potential additional pertinent articles, and to test string sensitivity. The search string used was: coronavirus* OR Pneumonia of Unknown Etiology OR COVID-19 OR nCoV. The virus name was updated from "2019-nCoV" to "SARS-CoV-2" by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses on 11 February 2020, [16] yet we performed the search using the term "nCoV" since we presumed that no paper published between 11 February 2020 and 13 February 2020 would have used the term "SARS-COV-2". To achieve the highest sensitivity, we decided to use only a combination of keywords avoiding Mesh terms. Asterisks are used to truncate words, so that every ending after the asterisks was searched. We placed a language restriction for English, without other limits to the search.