Bibliometric Analysis Of Research on Coronavirus Infection and Patient Safety in Health Care

Abstract

Objective: The study aimed at analyzing the international scientific publications on coronavirus infection and patient safety in health care.

Methods: This research is a bibliometric study carried out by searching published articles in theISIWebofKnowledge/WebofScience database and analyzing the results through bibliometric analysis software HistCite. The selected time frame was between 1970 and 2020, and we used the following descriptors: “coronavirus infection” OR “severe acute respiratory syndrome” OR “COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2”.

Results: We found 5,434 publications in 1,491 different journals; they are written by 18,274 authors linked to 4,064 institutions, which are located in 104 countries. In the citations analysis, the h-index was 155, and the average of citations each article received was 30.79.

Conclusion: During the studied period, the Web of Science database showed two peaks of publications on coronavirus infections.The first comprised 768 articles published between 2003 and 2004 when a new coronavirus caused an outbreak of severe acute respiratory failure. The second consisted of 576 articles published between 2019 and 2020, during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic COVID-19. The knowledge on coronavirus infection should be widely shared so that new studies can be designed and the world scientific community can contribute to improving patient safety in healthcare and preventing new pandemics of severe acute respiratory infection caused by coronaviruses.