Material and Methods
We obtained publications from the SCIE and SSCI in the Web of Science
from 1900 to June 30, 2020. The search terms ”Coronavirus*”, ”SARS”,
”MERS”, ”2019-nCoV”, ”COVID-19”, ”SARS-CoV*”, ”MERS-CoV”, ”HCoV-229E”,
”HCoV-OC43”, ”HCoV-NL63”, ”HCoV-HKU1”, ”Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome*” and ”Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome*” were selected and
used to search the titles, abstracts and keywords of publications in
journals.
England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales were considered part of
the United Kingdom (UK), while Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan were
considered distinct from mainland China due to differences in their
political systems.
We used ArcGIS (10.6) to map the geographical distribution of global
publications and reported cases of infections with three human
pathogenic coronaviruses. Gephi (0.9.2) was used to visualize core
countries and territories in the international collaboration network.
The following aspects were analysed: (a) the characteristics of the
publications; (b) the geographical distributions and international
collaborations; and (c) keywords indicating hot topics.