Visible Insights of the Invisible Pandemic: A Scientometric, Altmetric and Topic Trend Analysis
It addresses the challenge of extracting insights from the rapid proliferation of COVID-19 information for researchers and society, but is incremental as it applies existing scientometric and altmetric methods to new data.
This paper analyzes the large volume of COVID-19 research and social media activity to identify influential papers, key knowledge bases, and trending topics, concluding with implications of the findings.
The recent SARS-COV-2 virus outbreak has created an unprecedented global health crisis! The disease is showing alarming trends with the number of people getting infected with this disease, new cases and death rate are all highlighting the need to control this disease at the earliest. The strategy now for the governments around the globe is how to limit the spread of the virus until the research community develops treatment/drug or vaccination against the virus. The outbreak of this disease has unsurprisingly led to huge volume of research within a short period of time surrounding this disease. It has also led to aggressive social media activity on twitter, Facebook, dedicated blogs, news reports and other online sites actively involved in discussing about the various aspects of and related to this disease. It becomes a useful and challenging exercise to draw from this huge volume of research, the key papers that form the research front, its influence in the research community, and other important research insights. Similarly, it becomes important to discern the key issues that influence the society concerning this disease. The paper is motivated by this. It attempts to distinguish which are the most influential papers, the key knowledge base and major topics surrounding the research covered by COVID-19. Further it attempts to capture the society's perception by discerning key topics that are trending online. The study concludes by highlighting the implications of this study.