Contributions of Latin American researchers in the understanding of the novel coronavirus outbreak: a literature review

This article aimed to give the visibility of Latin American researchers’ contributions to the comprehension of COVID-19; our method was a literature review. Currently, the world is facing a health and socioeconomic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and its disease COVID-19. Therefore, in less than 4 months, researchers have published a significant number of articles related to this novel virus. For instance, a search focused on the Scopus database on 10 April 2020, showed 1,224 documents published by authors with 1,797 affiliations from 80 countries. A total of 25.4%, 24.0% and 12.6% of these national affiliations were from China, Europe and the USA, respectively, making these regions leaders in COVID-19 research. In the case of Latin America, on 10 April 2020, we searched different databases, such as Scopus, PubMed and Web of Science, finding that the contribution of this region was 2.7 ± 0.6% of the total publications found. In other words, we found 153 publications related to COVID-19 with at least one Latin American researcher. We summarized and processed the information from these 153 publications, finding active participation in topics like medical, social and environmental considerations, bioinformatics and epidemiology.