A scientometric analysis of the effect of COVID-19 on the spread of
  research outputs
Gianpaolo Zammarchi Andrea Carta Silvia Columbu Luca Frigau Monica Musio
The spread of the Sars-COV-2 pandemic in 2020 had a huge impact on the life
course of all of us. This rapid spread has also caused an increase in the
research production in topics related to COVID-19 with regard to different
aspects. Italy has, unfortunately, been one of the first countries to be
massively involved in the outbreak of the disease. In this paper we present an
extensive scientometric analysis of the research production both at global
(entire literature produced in the first 2 years after the beginning of the
pandemic) and local level (COVID-19 literature produced by authors with an
Italian affiliation). Our results showed that US and China are the most active
countries in terms of number of publications and that the number of
collaborations between institutions varies according to geographical distance.
Moreover, we identified the medical-biological as the fields with the greatest
growth in terms of literature production. Furthermore, we also better explored
the relationship between the number of citations and variables obtained from
the data set (e.g. number of authors per article). Using multiple
correspondence analysis and quantile regression we shed light on the role of
journal topics and impact factor, the type of article, the field of study and
how these elements affect citations.