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

DAVIDE GORI; Erik Boetto; Maria Pia Fantini

Recent events highlight how emerging and re-emerging pathogens are actually becoming global challenges for public health. [1] Coronaviruses are enveloped RNA viruses which are broadly distributed either in humans or in a vast majority of other mammals and birds. These viruses have the possibility to cause respiratory, enteric, hepatic, and neurologic diseases. [2, 3] Coronaviruses are highly prevalent in many species. They have a large genetic diversity. Given their RNA, they are susceptible to frequent recombination and mutations of their genomes. In context in which there are increasing human-animal interactions, novel coronaviruses are very likely to emerge periodically. If the newly created cross-species pathogens acquires the ability to infect humans or to be transmitted human to human it can lead to occasional spillover events and epidemics. [4, 5, 6] In the past years two other strains of Coronavirus -severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) -have emerged as potential public health worldwide threats. [5] SARS-CoV was the causal agent of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreaks in 2002 and 2003 in Guangdong Province, China; [7, 8, 9] MERS-CoV was the pathogen responsible for severe respiratory disease outbreaks in 2012 in the Middle East. [10] On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology detected in Wuhan City, located in the Hubei Province, China, associated with exposures in a seafood and wet wholesale market in the same city. A new type of coronavirus was isolated on 7 January 2020. [11] On 30 January 2020 WHO declared the outbreak to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). [12] This novel coronavirus suddenly turned out to be a global health concern for a disease, called Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), [13] which was characterized as a pandemic by WHO on 11 March 2020. [14] Starting from the second-half of January 2020, scientific literature has been particularly focused on the description of this new viral outbreak; the main topics addressed were the epidemiological, clinical and virological aspects as well as the possible public health choices necessary to contain the spread of the disease. Nevertheless, several aspects are still unclear and have not been thoroughly explored, leaving grey areas in our knowledge of the disease and of the outbreak. The aim of this paper is to perform a bibliometric analysis on the first papers published in the early stages of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, in order to give a glimpse to the researchers of "who published what" at the very beginning of this Public Health Emergency of International Concern.