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.