A Review of the Scientific Contributions of Nepal on COVID-19.

Purpose of Review: There has been a high influx of publications on the SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 worldwide in the recent few months as very little was known about them. Nepal too had a substantial number of publications on the same, and there was a need to track the most relevant and impactful to the scientific community through bibliometric analysis. Recent Findings: A total of 72 publications were analyzed. Bagmati Pradesh (88%) and its district, Kathmandu (77%), was with the most publications. There were no publications from Gandaki and Karnali Province. Most of the publications were in the international medical journals (82%), 53% chose European journals to publish, and 15.27% were related to and published in psychology journals. The majority were original articles (39%) and mostly related to public health (20.83%). 59.7% of the papers had Nepalese as the first author. Most of them were affiliated with Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital and Patan Academy of Health Sciences. Summary: Our analysis suggests a need to shift the type of studies from observational studies to studies oriented more towards the therapeutic and clinical trials of available medicines and patient care management. Similarly, the bibliometric analysis gives an overall picture of Nepali medical research's publication status around the globe.

The 2020 research pandemic: A bibliometric analysis of publications on COVID-19 and their scientific impact during the first months.

BACKGROUND: The outbreak of COVID-19 has created a landslide of publications, from different sources and unequal impact. We considered that the first 3 months are crucial to understand how knowledge has been generated by performing a bibliometric analysis, including the citations to these articles to guide researchers in exploring this field, and to evaluate the relationship between confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths with the number of papers per country. METHODS: Scientific publications were obtained from PubMed (January-March 2020) and their citations during the first 6 months retrieved from the Scopus database. An analysis of the number of papers by country, approach (type and category of publication), and impact was made. A multiple linear regression model was implemented to analyze the correlation between the number of publications and confirmed cases and deaths. RESULTS: A total of 2,530 publications were analyzed with 59,104 citations (23.4 citations/article), written by authors from 67 countries. China was the country with more publications (988, 39%) and more citations (36,416, 63%) followed by the United States with 423 articles (16.7%) and 7,458 citations (12.6%). The coauthorship network identified 10,756 authors. According to the multivariate analysis, both confirmed cases and deaths were significantly correlated with the number of publications per country (corrected by population size and gross domestic product). CONCLUSION: The correlation with the number of publications suggests that cases and deaths had some impact on the medical literature, reflecting how rapidly the scientific community has been on the frontline in the fight against COVID-19.

Rapid implementation of telehealth in geriatric outpatient clinics due to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the rapid implementation of telehealth. However, little is known about its suitability for the older population. We evaluated the use of telehealth in geriatric outpatient clinics. Half of the appointments needed to be re-scheduled due to language barrier, poor connection, hard of hearing and inability to perform assessments. Advantages included time efficiency and ability to visualise the home. Preference for the future was initial appointments as face-face, but reviews as either telehealth or face-face.