Global Trends of the Researches on COVID-19: A Bibliometric Analysis via VOSviewer

Objective: This study aims to make a retrospective analysis of the publications on coronavirus infection emerging in Wuhan, China on December 8, 2019, spreading to the world and being announced as a pandemic. Method: Web of Science database was scanned using the keywords “Coronavirus, COVID-19, 2019 novel coronavirus disease, 2019 novel coronavirus infection, 2019-nCoV disease, 2019-nCoV infection, coronavirus disease 2019, coronavirus disease-19” on the studies published between January 1 and April 30, 2020. Identification and analysis of the data were based on criteria such as countries, publications, authors, journals, institutions, cited references, and some relationships between these variables. Descriptive features of publications were analyzed in Microsoft Excel. Analysis and visualization of some selected criteria were carried out through the VOSviewer and the ArcGIS. Results: Web of Science database was scanned using the keywords “Coronavirus, COVID-19, 2019 novel coronavirus disease, 2019 novel coronavirus infection, 2019-nCoV disease, 2019-nCoV infection, coronavirus disease 2019, coronavirus disease-19” on the studies published between January 1 and April 30, 2020. Identification and analysis of the data were based on criteria such as countries, publications, authors, journals, institutions, cited references, and some relationships between these variables. Descriptive features of publications were analyzed in Microsoft Excel. Analysis and visualization of some selected criteria were carried out through the VOSviewer and the ArcGIS. Conclusion: Through the bibliographic matching method used to form clusters of publications, the main focus and major topics in these publications were highlighted. This study once again emphasized that the researches on COVID-19 are a really important key to ending this pandemic.