How Have Global Scientists Responded to Tackling COVID-19?

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the global scientific communities across almost all countries have made urgent, intensive, and continuous effort on understanding, fighting and modeling the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 research turns out to be the first overwhelming global scientific reaction to significant global crises and threats. This literature analysis report collects and summarizes the profiles, trends, quality and impact of this global scientific response. It collects and analyzes 346,267 scientific references in English, involving researchers from 189 countries and regions in 27 subject areas. The report generates a picture of how global scientists have responded to COVID-19 between Jan 2020 and Mar 2022 in terms of their publication quantity, impact, focused major problems, and research areas and methods over country/region, discipline and time and collaboratively. The report also captures broad-reaching distributions and trends of modeling COVID-19 by AI, data science, analytics, shallow and deep machine learning, epidemic modeling, applied mathematics, and social science methods, etc. We further show the correlations between publication quality and quantity and economic status and COVID-19 infections globally and in major countries and regions. The literature analysis results of this global scientific response to COVID-19 present a comprehensive global, regional and subject-specific picture of the significant cross-disciplinary, cross-country, cross-problem, and cross-technique profiles and differences of the COVID-19 publication quantity and quality. The report also discloses significant imbalances in the COVID-19 research across countries/regions, subject areas, problems, topics, methods, research collaborations, and economic statuses. We share the source and analytical data of this global literature analysis for further research on this unprecedented and future crises. More Information about COVID-19 ModelingO_ST_ABSThe COVID-19 global scientists response datasetC_ST_ABSThe COVID-19 global scientists response dataset supporting this report can be found in Kaggle at: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/datascienceslab/covid19-global-scientists-response, Dataset doi: 10.34740/kaggle/dsv/4077649. More information about COVID-19 modelingInterested readers may refer to the following review on modeling COVID-19 which complements this global literature analysis: Longbing Cao and Qing Liu, COVID-19 Modeling: A Review, 1-103, 2022 (version 2). Accessible at medRxiv: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.22.22279022v1. More information about COVID-19 modeling, including the analytical results of this report and data and review on COVID-19 can be found at: https://datasciences.org/covid19-modeling. Citation of this reportLongbing Cao and Wenfeng Hou. How have global scientists responded to tackling COVID-19? Full technical report, https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.16.22278871, Data Science Lab, University of Technology Sydney, 2022.