key: cord-294685-rhhx5gcg
authors: Vasantha Raju, N.
title: Indian Publications on SARS-CoV-2: A Bibliometric Study of WHO COVID-19 Database
date: 2020-06-09
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1101/2020.06.08.20125518
sha: 
doc_id: 294685
cord_uid: rhhx5gcg

Nowadays, the whole World is under threat of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many fatalities and forced scientific communities to foster their Research and Development (R & D) activities. As a result, there is an enormous growth of scholarly literature on the subject. In order to combat this novel coronavirus, the open access to scientific literature is essential. On this line, many reputed academic institutions and publication firms have made their literature on COVID-19 accessible to all. By maintaining the database of updated information on global literature on Coronavirus disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) is playing a pivotal role. The present study analyzed 89 Indian publications on SARS-CoV-2 accessible through WHO COVID-19 database. The research data was restricted for the period of 2/3/2020 to 12/5/2020. The analysis was carried out in light of the objectives of the study. The study found the considerable and constant growth of Indian publications on COVID-19 from mid-April. It is interesting to note that the prolific authors belong to either AIIMS or ICMR institutes. Majority of the COVID-19 articles were found to be collaborative publications. The study noticed that no research publications on COVID-19 have appeared from North Eastern region. Regarding the research output on COVID-19, the performance of largest states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar was found to be poor. Delhi state contributed highest publications on COVID-19. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi was the most productive institution in terms of publications. It is also important to note that the central government undertakings like AIIMS and ICMR, New Delhi and its affiliated institutions shared largest proportion of publications on COVID-19. The Indian Journal of Medical Research has emerged as the productive journal contributing highest number of the publications. The highest contribution in COVID-19 research takes the form of journal articles. In terms of research area, the majority of the publications were related to Epidemiology. The study reported covid, coronavirus, India, pandemic, sars etc. as the frequently occurred keywords in the COVID-19 publications. The highly cited publications were of evidenced based studies. It is observed that the studies pertaining to virology, diagnosis and treatment, clinical features etc. have received highest citations than general studies on epidemiology or pandemic

Coronavirus or novel coronavirus which is taxonomically termed as SARS-CoV-2and named by World Health organization (WHO) as COVID-19 which emerged from Wuhan city, Hubei Province of China by the end of 2019 has caused unprecedented panic across the world. The rapid transmission of this virus from human to human made the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare this as the public health emergency of international concern and called it as global pandemic (Song & Karako, 2020) . As on May 14, 2020, globally 4248389 COVID-19 cases have been reported and caused 292046deaths. Highest human casualty reported from USA with 109121 deaths (World Health Organization Situation Report, 2020). The Bibliometric studies which helps in quantifying the research publication pattern in a particular domain have also been done to assess the research productivity of scientific literature on COVID-19. Bibliometric studies help in identifying the emerging area of research, provide evidence of impact of research through citations, helps in identifying right scholarly literature to consult for study and also for carrying research forward, and also helpful policy makers to strategize the potential research areas and funding. There were few bibliometric studies on COVID-19 publications pattern worldwide (Dehghanbanadaki et al, 2020; Hossain, 2020; Nasab, & Rahim, 2020) . There is hardly any studies on country specific. In this regard here in an attempt has been made to look into the Indian contributions to COVID-19 research publications.

The study used World Health organization ( For current study the researcher used the following keywords to retrieve data on Indian Publication from WHO COVID-19 database. WHO has made its COVID-19 database searchable freely and data can be exported to .CSV and RIS format. The search terms used for retrieving the data were "COVID-19" and "India". The "title, abstract and subject" option available on the database website was used to retrieve the documents. The search results retrieved107 results for the search term. The database was search on 12 th May 2020. The data was exported from .CSV format to excel sheet for further refinement of data and analysis. After thoroughly reviewing the data, it was found that there were few repeatable titles and titles not associated with Indian author or authors and articles other than English language were excluded from the study. Only articles written in English were included in the study. In all 89 articles were considered for the final analysis.

The study analyzed the date-wise Indian publication pattern on COVID-19, most profile authors, institutions with highest publications, states with highest publication based corresponding authors state affiliation, top journals in which Indians have published their publications frequently and document type and research area, author keywords tree map analysis and highly cited COVID-19 documents of Indian authors. For retrieving the citation data for identifying the top cited documents, Google Scholar citation database was used. In order to determine the research focus or area of Indian publications on COVID-19, the author used the similar subject categories of earlier study done by Lou, et al (2020) 

The study used descriptive statistics to analyze and visualized the data. The data analysis and result of the study is presented here in this section.

. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. .

Figure-1 indicates the datea-wise daily publication pattern of Indians on COVID-19. All the publications that have been included in the study were curated from March 03, 2020 to May 08, 2020 in WHO database. As it can be seen from Table-1 CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. 

The state-wise publication profile was created by using corresponding author state affiliation. is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. This geographic heat map is generated by using freely available excel template developed by www.indzara.com . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.08.20125518 doi: medRxiv preprint

The bubble chart (Figure-3) shows that government medical and research institutions importance in times of health crisis. It is worth mentioning that, the National Institute of Virology, Pune has recently developed IgG ELISA test kit for coronavirus for speeding the antibody test, which is a first of its kind in India (Prasad, 2020) .

. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.08.20125518 doi: medRxiv preprint

The Indians have published their publications on novel coronavirus or COVID-19 in 51 journals. (13.48%) were commentary/opinion/perspective/viewpoints kind of documents, 7 (7.87%) were reviews, . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. . 6 (6.74%) were of guidelines/protocol/report related publications, another same number of documents were news items, 5 (5.62%) were editorials and 2 (2.25%) were short communications. If one were to see the document type, all kinds of documents ranging from articles to short communications were published. In terms of research area, of the 89 publications 75 of them were related to Epidemiology, which accounts for 84.27% of the total publications, 6 (6.74%) were related to Diagnosis & Treatment, 4 (4.49%) publications were on virology and 3 (3.37%) publications were of laboratory Examinations related studies 

The hierarchical tree map (Figure-5) indicates the frequency of author assigned keywords to the documents that they have published on COVID-19. Keywords are helpful in identifying key domains of research and its growth. The keywords of corpus contained 415 words with 208 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.08.20125518 doi: medRxiv preprint unique words, same have been used to identify the frequency of keywords on COVID-19. It is found that "covid" (34 times), "coronavirus" (23 times), "India" (14 times), "pandemic" (12 times), "sars" (8 times), "cov", "health", "management", "syndrome" found 6 times each. Other keywords frequently appeared in the document can be seen in Figure-5 . 

Eighty Nine articles have received 186 citations in all with an average citations of 2.18per documents. Table-3 Table, followed by the article "Full-genome sequences of the first two SARS-CoV-. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. .

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19 with or without diabetes: A systematic search and a narrative review with a special reference to India and other developing countries. 

The results of the study reflect the current Indian scholarly publications on COVID-19 or SARS- published more number of articles than any other journals, it accounts for almost 16% of total . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 9, 2020. . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.08.20125518 doi: medRxiv preprint publications. ICMR and its other associated institutions have published largely on this journal on COVID-19.

Indian research is largely done in the area of epidemiology and its impact on diabetes, cardio patients, environmental impact and pandemic outbreak, less studies on clinical prognosis, pharmaceutical interventions, and laboratory based studies or virology related studies on SARS-CoV-2. The highly cited publications were of evidenced based studies, for instance "Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19 with or without diabetes: A systematic search and a narrative review with a special reference to India and other developing countries" or "Prudent public health intervention strategies to control the coronavirus disease 2019 transmission in India: A mathematical model-based approach" which have been cited by 28 times and other studies as well. As this pandemic is no way to go early, the research is shifting from basic to experimental studies across the globe (Nasab & Rahim, 2020) , if we see the top highly cited documents in India also gradually studies are shifting more towards evidence based medical research for finding drugs or vaccine at the earliest for this highly infectious disease.

This bibliometric study though provides a bird-eye-view of the publications pattern of Indians on COVID-19, one must be bit cautious in generalizing the results of this study. WHO COVID-19 database curated only expert-referred scientific articles and literature available through LitCOVID database of National Library of Medicine (NLM). It has not included the articles available through preprint servers or central subject repositories such as medRxiv and bioRxiv or arXiv e-print server o SSRN repository. It is suggested to take up a similar study using dimension.ai or semantic scholar's CORD-19 dataset which includes articles deposited in preprint servers on COVID-19 to see the different publications pattern of Indian Publications on novel coronavirus or COVID-19 in a much larger scale. The dynamic nature of inclusion of literature to the WHO database on a daily basis is also be considered while generalizing this study.

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