Large-Scale Bibliometric Analysis of Coronavirus

Coronavirus constitutes a family of RNA viruses causing respiratory tract infections in both humans and birds. A mild disease appears like the common cold, and in other cases, causes Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), or COVID-19. As compared to COVID-19, SARS and MERS were limited to certain countries. On the other hand, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on Mar. 11, 2020. In this research, we perform the bibliometric assessment of Coronavirus research using the Scopus database. We studied 27,824 articles written by 64,903 researchers from 1951 till June 20, 2020, published in 3,858 different sources. More than 65% of research appeared in the form of articles. More than 34% of publications appeared in 2020, coinciding with the appearance of COVID-19. This also resulted in a sharp increase in the average citation from 2.2 observed in 2019 to 14.5 seen in the year 2020. The USA is the most-cited country, followed by China. Nevertheless, Russia appears as the most-cited country per year. © 2021 WITPress. All rights reserved.