Highly Cited Articles in Coronavirus Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, an analysis of 806 highly cited articles was carried out based on the data retrieved from SCOPUS multidisciplinary database on ‘Coronavirus’ research published during 1970-2019 and 2020. The term ‘Coronavirus’ was used to retrieve data from the fields - title, abstract & keyword. Further, an analysis was carried out for the citation life cycle of the highly cited articles, performance of authors, institutions, country, and journals. During the period a total of 18,116 articles published up to 2019; and 1221 articles published in 2020 till 30 March 2020. The articles with more than 100 citations were taken as highly cited articles in coronavirus research. On this basis, there were 806 articles with more than 100 citations and considered for the data analysis. The highly cited articles were mostly published from the USA. The ‘Journal of Virology’ was most productive journal publishing most of the highly cited articles. These highly cited articles were published between 1973 to 2016. The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong was the most productive institute, published most number of highly cited articles. Kwok Yung Yuen from the University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen was the most productive author, who has published most number of highly cited articles. The seven articles had shown ‘sleeping beauty’ characteristics in citation trends.