Characteristics of scientific articles on COVID-19 published during the initial 3 months of the pandemic
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Characteristics of scientific articles on COVID‑19 published during the initial 3 months of the pandemic Nicola Di Girolamo1,2 · Reint Meursinge Reynders3,4 Received: 22 May 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized by an unprecedented amount of published scientific articles. The aim of this study is to assess the type of articles published during the first 3 months of the COVID-19 pandemic and to compare them with articles published during 2009 H1N1 swine influenza pandemic. Two operators independently extracted and assessed all articles on COVID-19 and on H1N1 swine influenza that had an abstract and were indexed in PubMed during the first 3 months of these pandemics. Of the 2482 articles retrieved on COVID-19, 1165 were included. Over half of them were secondary articles (590, 50.6%). Common primary articles were: human medical research (340, 59.1%), in silico studies (182, 31.7%) and in vitro studies (26, 4.5%). Of the human medical research, the vast majority were observational studies and cases series, followed by single case reports and one randomized controlled trial. Secondary articles were mainly reviews, viewpoints and editorials (373, 63.2%). Limitations were reported in 42 out of 1165 abstracts (3.6%), with 10 abstracts reporting actual methodological limitations. In a similar timeframe, there were 223 articles published on the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. During the COVID-19 pandemic there was a higher prevalence of reviews and guidance articles and a lower prevalence of in vitro and animal research studies compared with the H1N1 pandemic. In conclusions, compared to the H1N1 pandemic, the majority of early publications on COVID-19 does not provide new information, possibly diluting the original data published on this disease and consequently slowing down the development of a valid knowledge base on this disease. Also, only a negligible number of published articles reports limitations in the abstracts, hindering a rapid interpretation of their shortcomings. Researchers, peer reviewers, and editors should take action to flatten the curve of secondary articles. Keywords Covid-19 · Coronavirus · SARS-nCoV-2 · Study design · Research quality · Healthcare policy
The protocol was registered in Open Science Framework as: ‘Characteristics of scientific articles on COVID-19 published during the initial 3 months of the pandemic: protocol for a meta-epidemiological study’. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1119 2-020-03632-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Scientometrics
Introduction The WHO was informed on December 31st 2019 that a number of patients were hospitalized for a pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan City, China (WHO 2020). In the following week, molecular diagnostic techniques identified a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) as responsible of th
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