The COVID-19 research landscape: Measuring topics and collaborations using scientific literature

OBJECTIVES: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused heavy burdens and brought tremendous challenges to global public health. This study aimed to investigate collaboration relationships, research topics, and research trends on COVID-19 using scientific literature. METHOD: COVID-19-related articles published from January 1 to July 1, 2020 were retrieved from PubMed database. A total of 27,370 articles were included. Excel 2010, Medical Text Indexer (MTI), VOSviewer, and D3.js were used to summarize bibliometric features. RESULTS: The number of the COVID-19 research publications has been continuously increasing after its break. United States was the most productive and active country for COVID-19 research, with the largest number of publications and collaboration relationships. Huazhong University of Science and Technology from China was the most productive institute on the number of publications, and University of Toronto from Canada ranked as Top 1 institute for global research collaboration. Four key research topics were identified, of which the topic of epidemiology and public health interventions has gathered highest attentions. Topic of virus infection and immunity has been more focused during the early stage of COVID-19 outbreak compared with later stage. The topic popularity of clinical symptoms and diagnosis has been steady. CONCLUSIONS: Our topic analysis results revealed that the study of drug treatment was insufficient. To achieve critical breakthroughs of this research area, more interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, and global research collaborations are needed.