The multidisciplinary nature of COVID-19 research

  1. Ricardo Arencibia-Jorge
  2. Lourdes García-García
  3. Ernesto Galban-Rodriguez
  4. Humberto Carrillo-Calvet

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Abstract

Objective. We analyzed the scientific output after COVID-19 and contrasted it with studies published in the aftermath of seven epidemics/pandemics: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Influenza A virus H5N1 and Influenza A virus H1N1 human infections, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola virus disease, Zika virus disease, and Dengue. Design/Methodology/Approach. We examined bibliometric measures for COVID-19 and the rest of the studied epidemics/pandemics. Data were extracted from Web of Science, using its journal classification scheme as a proxy to quantify the multidisciplinary coverage of scientific output. We proposed a novel Thematic Dispersion Index (TDI) for the analysis of pandemic early stages.  Results/Discussion. The literature on the seven epidemics/pandemics before COVID-19 has shown explosive growth of the scientific production and continuous impact during the first three years following each emergence or re-emergence of the specific infectious disease. A subsequent decline was observed with the progressive control of each health emergency. We observed an unprecedented growth in COVID-19 scientific production. TDI measured for COVID-19 (29,4) in just six months, was higher than TDI of the rest (7,5 to 21) during the first three years after epidemic initiation. Conclusions. COVID-19 literature showed the broadest subject coverage, which is clearly a consequence of its social, economic, and political impact. The proposed indicator (TDI), allowed the study of multidisciplinarity, differentiating the thematic complexity of COVID-19 from the previous seven epidemics/pandemics. Originality/Value. The multidisciplinary nature and thematic complexity of COVID-19 research were successfully analyzed through a scientometric perspective.

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  1. Version published to 10.47909/ijsmc.13
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.23.394312: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitations: The main limitation of this study is its intrinsic bias. WoS-based results may differ from those obtained from other databases. However, previous studies have successfully used this data set (Zhang et al., 2020). To our knowledge, this is the first study that uses a journal classification scheme to analyze multidisciplinarity of COVID-19 from the bibliometric perspective. We consider that the WCs core offered an essential multidisciplinarity dimension as it covers the largest volume of articles and citations. The new metric we are proposing may be used to compare different levels of aggregation (institutions, individuals, countries), using complementary diversity measures to analyze the sets of publications (Moschini et al., 2020; Porter and Rafols, 2009). TDI would be relatively easy to implement in other internet-available databases with large journal classification schemes (e.g., Scopus or Dimensions).

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.11.23.394312v1 on bioRxiv