COVID-19 enabled co-authoring networks: a country-case analysis

In this paper we seek to examine the co-authoring pattern of a select group of researchers that are affiliated with a specific country. By way of making use of standard bibliometric analysis, we explore the publication evolution of all COVID-19-related peer reviewed papers that have been (co)-authored by researchers that are affiliated with Greek institutions. The aim is to identify its advancement over time, the institutions involved and the countries with which the co-authors are affiliated with. The timeframe of the study spans from the moment that WHO Director-General declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (WHO, 2020. Archived: WHO timeline-covid-19. Retrieved from Archived: Who Timeline-COVID-19. https://www.who.int/news/item/27-04-2020-who-timeline---covid-19. Accessed on 10 May 2020., Archived: WHO timeline-covid-19), January 2020, to October 2020. Findings indicate that there is a steady increase in the number of publications as well as the number of scientific collaborations over time. At a cross-country level, results suggest that the affiliated institutional sectors such as the Higher Education Sector (HES) and the Government Sector (GOV) contributed the most in terms of scientific output. On an international scale, the evolution of the scientific collaboration is imprinted and distributed as a chain of affiliations that linked nations together. Such chains are represented as clusters of countries, in which the scientific connections between different countries can be visualised. It can be reasoned that a significant amount of publications (20%) is affiliated with countries having “traditionally” major scientific impact on the field of Medicine. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-021-03952-9.