Evaluating research performance of Coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic using scientometric indicators

Abstract

Purpose

This study is an attempt to evaluating the growth of scientific literature in the domain of coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic research based on scientometric indicators: prolific countries and relative citation impact (RCI); influential institutions; author analysis and network, h-index and citation; DC (degree of collaboration), CC (collaboration coefficient), MCI (modified collaboration index) in the subject domain of coronavirus and Covid-19 research.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors adopted approaches to obtain the literature data from Scopus database from 2000 to 2020 by conducting a systematic search using keywords related to the studied subject domain. In total, 15,297 numbers of records were considered for the literature analysis considering the real significant growth of this subject domain. This study presented the scientometric analysis of these publications. Furthermore, statistical correlations have been used to understand the collaboration pattern. Visualization tool VOSviewer is used to construct the co-author network.

Findings

The present study found that 53.57% (8,195) of the research documents published on the open-access platform. Journal of Virology was found to be most preferred journal by the researcher producing around 839(5.48%) articles. USA and China dominate in the research output, and the University of Hong Kong has produced the highest number of research paper 547(3.58%). A significant portion of the research documents are published in the subject domain of medicine (49.70%), followed by immunology and microbiology (35.72%), and biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology subject domains (22.32%). There has been an unparalleled proliferation of publications on COVID-19 since January 2020 and also a significant distribution of research funds across the globe.

Research limitations/implications

The study exclusively examines 15,297 research outputs which have been indexed in the Scopus database from 2000 to 2020 (till 01 April 2020). Thus, documents published in any other different channels and sources which are not covered in Scopus are excluded from the purview of research.

Practical implications

It will be beneficial for researchers and practitioners worldwide for understanding the growth of scientific literature in the coronavirus and COVID-19 and identifying potential collaborator.

Originality/value

Considering the global impact and social distress due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, this study is significant in the present scenario for identifying the growth of scientific literature in this field and evolving of this domain of research around the globe. The research results are useful to identify valuable research patterns from publications and of developments in the field of coronavirus and COVID-19.

Citation

Sahoo, S. and Pandey, S. (2020), "Evaluating research performance of Coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic using scientometric indicators", Online Information Review, Vol. 44 No. 7, pp. 1443-1461. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0252