Co-authorship network analysis and social network indicators of coronavirus research

The aim of this study was to examine the status of documents related to coronavirus based on scientometric indicators and to draw a co-authorship map of authors, organizations and countries producing an article to get to know this field as much as possible.

This applied-scientometric was conducted using social network analysis. The statistical population of this study was all published documents related to coronavirus from 1985 to 2019 in Web of Science (WoS), and finally, 6980 documents were retrieved. Then, VOSviewer was used to analyze and draw the co-authorship map.

Among the top authors in the field of coronavirus, “Christian Drosten” with 85 documents and 4835 citations, “Yuen Kwok-Yung” with 70 documents and 3862 citations as well as “Patrick CY Woo” with 49 documents and 3160 citations have achieved the first to third place in terms of the number of co-authorship in this field, respectively. Moreover, the top authors, countries and organizations in the field of coronavirus had 11, 9 and 12 thematic clusters, respectively.

In this study, the results of co-authorship network analysis on coronavirus allow researchers to learn about the relationships between important elements and identify key individuals, organizations and countries in this field. Besides, the results of this study can pave the way for cooperation and knowledge sharing among experts in this field with other scientific fields.