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 initial search was implemented on February 20, 2020 in MEDLINE/Pubmed. The search query consisted of terms considered by the authors to describe the new epidemic: [coronavirus* OR Pneumonia of Unknown Etiology OR Covid-19 OR nCoV]. Although the virus name was updated to SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses on February 11th 2020 (Gorbalenya 2020), we performed the search using the term "nCoV" because it was presumed that no one, between February 11 and 13, 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. Furthermore, we limited the search to the following time-span: from December 1, 2019 to February 13, 2020. Due to the extraordinary rapidity with which scientific papers have been electronically published online (i.e. ePub), it may happen that some of these have indicated a date later than February 13 2020 as publication date.