Bibliometric Analysis of Early COVID-19 Research: The Top 50 Cited Papers

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly evolving with the number of cases exponentially rising The research scientific community has reacted promptly as evidenced by an outstanding number of COVID-19 related publications As the number of scientific publications rapidly rises, there is a need to dissect the factors that lead to highly impactful publications To that end, the present paper summarizes the characteristics of the top 50 cited COVID-19-related publications that emerged early during the pandemic Methods: A systematic search of the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar was performed, using keywords related to COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-19 Two independent authors reviewed all the search results, screening for the top 50 cited COVID-19-related articles Inclusion criteria comprised any publication on COVID-19 or the SARS-CoV-2 virus Data extracted included the type of study, journal, number of citations, number of authors, country of publication, and study content Results: As of May 29th, the top 50 cited articles were cited 63849 times during the last 4 months On average, 14 authors contributed to each publication Over half of the identified articles were published in only 3 journals Furthermore, 42% and 26% of the identified articles were retrospective case series and correspondence/viewpoints, respectively, while only 1 article was a randomized controlled trial In terms of content, almost half (48%) of the identified publications reported clinical/radiological findings while only 7 out of the 50 articles investigated potential treatments Conclusion: By highlighting the characteristics of the top 50 cited COVID-19-related articles, the authors hope to disseminate information that could assist researchers to identify the important topics, study characteristics, and gaps in the literature