key: cord-0785032-cb78h985
authors: Kambhampati, Srinivas B.S.; Vaishya, Raju; Vaish, Abhishek
title: Unprecedented surge in publications related to COVID-19 in the first three months of pandemic: A bibliometric analytic report
date: 2020-05-13
journal: J Clin Orthop Trauma
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcot.2020.04.030
sha: 20a62142ad26482877da86b69b07af1834737492
doc_id: 785032
cord_uid: cb78h985

nan

Coronavirus has already infected more than 3 million human beings and has consumed more than twohundred thousand lives. Apart from the social media, there has been a flurry of publications in the medical literature on the pandemic of COVID-19, within first three months of its onset.

We set out to see the trends of publications related to this condition on the PubMed and did search on 25/4/2020 using a search strategy (SARS-Cov-2) OR (COVID-19 AND Review articles were the most common (202) and Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) were the least common (4). When we searched the titles of articles for the type of study, we got the following numbers: 159, 50, 43, 41, 19, 32, 21, 4 for Review, Case Report, Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, Cohort, clinical trial, case series and RCT respectively.

The medical literature has responded almost as quickly as the spread of this virus and as PubMed is considered as one of the most reliable and widely used free search engine accessing the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics 2 . Although these numbers of publications in the PubMed are substantially high in such a short period for any disease, we believe that there are many more publications, in addition, which are still not published on the PubMed due to several reasons i.e., published as ahead of print and waiting to be published in a regular issue, some journals have an embargo period, some journals are still not listed on the PubMed and some of these are being published on preprint basis, which is not a peer-reviewed article but gets picked up the media and other sources.

The first case was reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 3 

Pneumonia of unknown aetiology in Wuhan, China: potential for international spread via commercial air travel

The Orthopaedic Forum Survey of COVID-19 Disease Among Orthopaedic Surgeons in Wuhan , People ' s Republic of China

BREAKING 'We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic

the #Thailand's Ministry of Public Health @pr_moph reported the first imported case of lab-confirmed novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from #Wuhan

We now have a name for the #2019nCoV disease: COVID-19. I'll spell it: C-O-V-I-D hyphen one nine -COVID-19' -@DrTedros #COVID19

Chart1: Weekly publications on COVID19 using search strategy