Gupta, R.; Prasad, A.; Babu, S.; Yadav, G. Impact of Coronavirus Outbreaks on Science and Society: Insights from Temporal Bibliometry of SARS and COVID-19. Entropy2021, 23, 626.
Gupta, R.; Prasad, A.; Babu, S.; Yadav, G. Impact of Coronavirus Outbreaks on Science and Society: Insights from Temporal Bibliometry of SARS and COVID-19. Entropy 2021, 23, 626.
Gupta, R.; Prasad, A.; Babu, S.; Yadav, G. Impact of Coronavirus Outbreaks on Science and Society: Insights from Temporal Bibliometry of SARS and COVID-19. Entropy2021, 23, 626.
Gupta, R.; Prasad, A.; Babu, S.; Yadav, G. Impact of Coronavirus Outbreaks on Science and Society: Insights from Temporal Bibliometry of SARS and COVID-19. Entropy 2021, 23, 626.
Abstract
A global event such as the COVID-19 crisis presents new, often unexpected responses that are fascinating to investigate from both, scientific and social standpoints. Despite several documented similarities, the Coronavirus pandemic is clearly distinct from the 1918 flu pandemic in terms of our exponentially increased, almost instantaneous ability to access/share information, offering an unprecedented opportunity to visualise rippling effects of global events across space and time. Personal devices provide “big data” on people’s movement, the environment and economic trends, while access to the unprecedented flurry in scientific publications and media posts provides a measure of the response of the educated world to the crisis. Most bibliometric (co-authorship, co-citation, or bibliographic coupling) analyses ignore the time dimension, but COVID-19 has made it possible to perform a detailed temporal investigation into the pandemic. Here, we report a comprehensive network analysis based on more than 20000 published documents on viral epidemics, authored by over 75,000 individuals from 140 nations in the past one year of the crisis. In contrast to the 1918 flu pandemic, access to published data over the past two decades enabled a comparison of publishing trends between the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and those of the 2003 SARS epidemic, to study changes in thematic foci and societal pressures dictating research over the course of a crisis.
Keywords
bibliometry; coronavirus; text and data mining; SARS; MERS; COVID-19
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Analysis
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
