ABSTRACT
Editorial materials express the opinions of the scientific community and guides the publication foci;thus, providing insight into the dynamics of the knowledge ecosystem in a scenario that impacts innovation and public policies. The purpose of this bibliometric analysis was to identify the main characteristics of the editorial materials published at the beginning stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, published between 2019 and April 30, 2020 and indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection. A total of 537 editorial materials were written by 1,455 authors, primarily in English, and in the general and internal medicine category. The majority of these editorial materials were published in the British Medical Journal and Lancet. The United States, China, and United Kingdom had the most editorial materials, with Harvard Medical School, Imperial College, and Oxford University were the leading universities. Richard Horton was the most prolific author and the editorial material by Hui et al. (2020) was the most cited. in the initial stage of COVID-19, editorial materials reflected contingent aspects of the course of the infection at the global, regional, and national levels. In the emerging and rapidly developing crisis of COWD-19, editorial materials allow the scientific community to engage in the ongoing discussions. Analysis of editorial materials fosters the understanding of the dynamics of the knowledge ecosystem.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has sickened more than six million people worldwide. This context has led to an abundance of publications quickly since the beginning of the outbreak. In a few months, thousands of scientific papers have appeared. This article aims to provide a bibliometric analysis of the publications on COVID-19 in five high-impact journals indexed to the Web of Science Core Collection's Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) including The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, and JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association. We found 169 documents associated with the search criteria. The findings indicate that China, the United States, and the United Kingdom are the most represented countries in these publications, The Lancet is the journal with the highest number of contributions with 66% of documents, and the University of Hong Kong leads the ranking of institutions. Future bibliometric and scientometric studies on COVID-19 should provide updated information to analyse other relevant indicators in this field.