key: cord-0732165-y0iddkjo authors: N, Vasantha Raju; Patil, S.B. title: Indian Publications on SARS-CoV-2: A bibliometric study of WHO COVID-19 database date: 2020-07-10 journal: Diabetes Metab Syndr DOI: 10.1016/j.dsx.2020.07.007 sha: 54f466b56ba827f6d92da4146554315cba13dd14 doc_id: 732165 cord_uid: y0iddkjo BACKGROUND & AIMS: 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. We here in this study have assessed the Indian publications contributions on COVID-19. METHODS: WHO is curating global scientific literature on coronavirus since it declared COVID-19 a global pandemic through Global Research Database on COVID-19. The present study analyzed Indian publications on SARS-CoV-2 as found in WHO COVID-19 database. The research data was restricted for the period of March 2, 2020 to May 12, 2020. RESULTS: The study found that there is a considerable and constant growth of Indian publications on COVID-19 from mid-April. It is interesting to note that, the most prolific authors belong to either AIIMS or ICMR institutes. Delhi state contributed highest number of publications on COVID-19. The AIIMS, New Delhi was the most productive institution in terms of publications. The Indian Journal of Medical Research has emerged as the productive journal contributing highest number of the publications. In terms of research area, the majority of the publications were related to Epidemiology. CONCLUSIONS: 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 1 . 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 2 . The first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in India was reported on 30 January 2020. As on 17 May 2020, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India has reported 90927 confirmed cases from 33 states with 2872 deaths 3 . Though India is in complete lockdown since March 24, over the weekend there is a rapid increase in COVID-19 cases in some states in India notably from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and few other states. The rapid increase over the weekend in the month of May has created some kind of panic in India. The government and other civil bodies are making efforts to mitigate the spread of this virus. Scientific literature on this pandemic is important in order to combat this novel coronavirus. Researchers across the world have been involved in identifying the cause, clinical features and developing possible vaccines for COVID-19. As a result there has been a rapid growth in publishing scholarly literature on the subject. Many academic institutions of international repute and also publication houses involving in scientific publishing industry have made their literature on COVID-19 or novel coronavirus freely available to the scientific community in particular for diagnosis, treatment and preventive strategies against the virus and public in general to create awareness of the infectious virus. 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 it also helpful for policy makers to strategize the potential research areas and funding. There were few bibliometric studies on COVID-19 publications pattern worldwide 4,5,6. . However, there is hardly any studies on country specific. In this regard, here an attempt has been made to look into the Indian contributions to COVID-19 research publications. WHO has made its COVID-19 database searchable freely and data can be exported to .CSV or 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. All the publications that have been included in the study were curated from March 03, 2020 to May 08, 2020 in WHO COVID-19 database. As it can be seen from Table-1 The state-wise publication profile was created by using corresponding author state affiliation. publications 38 (42.70%) were articles, 13 (almost 15%) were of letters to editor or correspondence, 12 (13.48%) were commentary/opinion/perspective/viewpoints kind of documents, 7 (7.87%) were reviews, 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 and 1 (1.12%)publication was on clinical features of COVID-19 patients. Fig. 4 clearly indicates the Indian research publication pattern with regard to research area. There were lot of studies on Epidemiology and its impact on diabetes, cardiologic patients and pandemic outbreak in India, less on clinical and laboratory examinations of COVID-19 patients and virology which are important for finding drugs or vaccine for the virus. The hierarchical tree map (Fig. 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 keyword corpus contained 415 words with 208 unique words, same have been used to identify the frequency of keyword occurrences on COVID-19. It is found that the keywords "covid" (34 times), "coronavirus" (23 times), "India" (14 times), "pandemic" (12 times), "sars" (8 times) etc., have the highest frequency of occurrences. Other highly cited articles can be seen in Table 3 . If one were to simply observe the highly cited documents, it can be seen that publications which are of virology related, diagnosis and treatment or clinical features and simulations or mathematical related studies have received more citation than general studies on epidemiology or pandemic. Eight out of six highly cited publications were appeared in two journals, they are: Research (IJMR). The results of the study reflects the current Indian scholarly publications on COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2. Result of this study found some significant insights. The authors who have 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 6 , 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 Indian authors on COVID-19, one must be a 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 , Research Square or SSRN preprint servers. 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. COVID-19 Real-time dissemination of scientific information to fight a public health emergency of international concern Coronavirus disease (COVID-19 Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India Bibliometric analysis of global scientific research on Coronavirus (COVID-19) Current status of global research on novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Abibliometric analysis and knowledge mapping Bibliometric analysis of global scientific researchon SARSCoV-2 (COVID-19) Coronavirus disease 2019: A bibliometric analysis and review Coronavirus: National Institute of Virology develops ELISA test to detect antibodies. The Hindu Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19 with or without diabetes: A systematic search and a narrative review with a special reference Prudent public health intervention strategies to control the coronavirus disease 2019 transmission in India: A mathematical modelbased approach Swarup India Journal of of COVID 2019: First suicidal case in India! Goyal, Kapil; Chauhan, Poonam; Chhikara, Komal Full-genome sequences of the first two SARS-CoV-2 viruses from India Journal of for diabetes care in India during COVID19 pandemic and national lockdown period: Guidelines for physicians Lopinavir/ritonavir combination therapy amongst symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 patients in India: Protocol for restricted public health emergency use Raman glycosylated haemoglobin and increase in diabetes-related complications: A simulation model using multivariate regression analysis Anoop Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: of COVID-19 epidemic in India: A stochastic mathematical model * Highly cited documents were identified through Google Scholar The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. Idea and study design: Vasantha Raju N., and Patil S.B; Data collection and draft writing: Vasantha Raju N.; Revision and Finalization: Done by Both the Authors The author(s) received no financial support for the study.