A bibliometric and co-occurrence analysis of COVID-19–related literature published between December 2019 and June 2020

Abstract

Purpose The main purposes of this study were to analyze the document types and languages of published papers on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), along with the top authors, publications, countries, institutions, and disciplines, and to analyze the co-occurrence of keywords and bibliographic coupling of countries and sources of the most-cited COVID-19 literature. Methods This study analyzed 16,384 COVID-19 studies published between December 2019 and June 2020. The data were extracted from the Web of Science database using four keywords: “COVID-19,” “coronavirus,” “2019-nCoV,” and “SARS-CoV-2.” The top 500 mostcited documents were analyzed for bibliographic and citation network visualization. Results The studies were published in 19 different languages, and English (95.313%) was the most common. Of 157 research-producing countries, the United States (25.433%) was in the leading position. Wang Y (n=94) was the top author, and the BMJ (n=488) was the top source. The University of London (n=488) was the leading organization, and medicine-related papers (n=2,259) accounted for the highest proportion. The co-occurrence of keywords analysis identified “coronavirus,” “COVID-19,” “SARS-CoV-2,” “2019-nCoV,” and “pneumonia” as the most frequent words. The bibliographic coupling analysis of countries and sources showed the strongest collaborative links between China and the United States and between the New England Journal of Medicine and the JAMA. Conclusion Collaboration between the United States and China was key in COVID-19 research during this period. Although BMJ was the leading title for COVID-19 articles, the co-author link between New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA was the strongest.

Keywords

• bibliometric analysis
• covid-19
• publications