RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 A scientometric overview of CORD-19
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.04.20.046144
DO 10.1101/2020.04.20.046144
A1 Giovanni Colavizza
A1 Rodrigo Costas
A1 Vincent A. Traag
A1 Nees Jan van Eck
A1 Thed van Leeuwen
A1 Ludo Waltman
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/28/2020.04.20.046144.abstract
AB As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, researchers from all disciplines are coming together and contributing their expertise. CORD-19, a dataset of COVID-19 and coronavirus publications, has recently been made available alongside calls to help mine the information it contains and to create tools to search it more effectively. We analyse the delineation of the publications included in CORD-19 from a scientometric perspective. Based on a comparison to the Web of Science database, we find that CORD-19 provides an almost complete coverage of research on COVID-19 and coronaviruses. However, CORD-19 contains not only research that deals directly with COVID-19 and coronaviruses, but also research on viruses in general. Publications from CORD-19 focus mostly on a few well-defined research areas, in particular: coronaviruses (primarily SARS, MERS, COVID-19); public health and viral epidemics; molecular biology of viruses; influenza and other families of viruses; immunology and antivirals; clinical medicine. CORD-19 publications that appeared in 2020, especially editorials and letters, are disproportionately popular on social media. While we fully endorse the CORD-19 initiative, it is important to be aware that CORD-19 extends beyond research on COVID-19 and coronaviruses.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.