Scientometric analyzing the output of researchers and organizations on COVID-19 for better conducting the scientific efforts: with a glance to endocrinology

Purpose As COVID-19 spreads rapidly and could affect the people and also lead to their death, especially individuals with underlying diseases, such as diabetes, the research community is also active in publishing novel research about it. Analyzing scientific outputs in this topic can represent an overview of publications. For this purpose, this study was conducted to determine status of publishing research works related to COVID-19 and analyzing the all documents published and indexed in Web of Science database and illustrate the co-occurrence and co-authority of hot papers in this documents. Methodology Our search strategy was based on using the related key terms including COVID-19, coronavirus, SARS2, etc., to find out all the published scientific works related to coronavirus disease indexed in web of science (WoS) in 2020. We then extracted the all hot papers and especially hot papers in endocrinology category and analyzed them. The data saved and imported in VOSviewer and ScientoPy programs for analysis and illustration of our data. We have shown our analysis in the tables, figures and maps. Results Totally, 56,402 records and 309 hot papers were retrieved. 3 of these hot papers were in endocrinology category. The most common type of publication was original papers followed by editorial papers in the second rank. The country with the most published documents was the USA followed by China. The journals of British Medical Journal and Journal of Medical Virology were ranked as the first and second sources, respectively. The Harvard University was the top organization with high proportion of scientific publications and the Lancet was the top-ranked journal that published highly-cited papers. Conclusion The literature on COVID-19 is increasing with a high and fast growth. In this regard, there is a need to evaluate these publications once in a while and their results should be published to use this information for more effective management of future research works with emphasizes on the gaps of researches and more citable documents and allocation of budgets on more needed research and don't carry out the duplicates research. This would be helpful for prevention, control, and treatment of COVID-19 that is now among the most common topics in the world.

Automated summary

This study analyzed all publications related to COVID-19 in the Web of Science database, retrieving a total of 56,402 records and 309 hot papers, with 3 of them falling under the endocrinology category. The most common publication type was original papers, followed by editorial papers. The USA had the highest number of published documents, followed by China, while the British Medical Journal and the Journal of Medical Virology were the top sources of publications. Harvard University and The Lancet were highlighted as top organizations and journals in terms of scientific output and highly-cited papers in this field.