A scientometric analysis of the effect of COVID-19 on the spread of research outputs

TL;DR

This paper conducts a comprehensive scientometric analysis of COVID-19 research outputs globally and in Italy, revealing key trends in publication activity, collaboration patterns, and factors influencing citation impact during the first two years of the pandemic.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into the dynamics of COVID-19 research production, collaboration, and citation patterns using advanced statistical methods like multiple correspondence analysis and quantile regression.

Findings

US and China lead in publication counts

Medical-biological fields show greatest growth

Journal impact factor and article type influence citations

Abstract

The spread of the Sars-COV-2 pandemic in 2020 had a huge impact on the life course of all of us. This rapid spread has also caused an increase in the research production in topics related to COVID-19 with regard to different aspects. Italy has, unfortunately, been one of the first countries to be massively involved in the outbreak of the disease. In this paper we present an extensive scientometric analysis of the research production both at global (entire literature produced in the first 2 years after the beginning of the pandemic) and local level (COVID-19 literature produced by authors with an Italian affiliation). Our results showed that US and China are the most active countries in terms of number of publications and that the number of collaborations between institutions varies according to geographical distance. Moreover, we identified the medical-biological as the fields with the greatest growth in terms of literature production. Furthermore, we also better explored the relationship between the number of citations and variables obtained from the data set (e.g. number of authors per article). Using multiple correspondence analysis and quantile regression we shed light on the role of journal topics and impact factor, the type of article, the field of study and how these elements affect citations.