Evolution of scientific collaboration on COVID-19: A bibliometric analysis

This paper considers the pattens of international collaboration by analysing publications on COVID-19 published in the first 6 months of the pandemic. The data set comprised articles on COVID-19 indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) downloaded four times between 1 April 2020 and 1 June 2020. The analysis of 5,827 documents revealed that 128 countries, 23,127 authors, and 6,349 institutes published on the pandemic. The data reveal that the three main publishing countries were the USA, China, and England with Italy closely following. Although publication was widely spread, most of the institutions with the highest volume of output were in China. Network analysis showed growth in international cooperation with an average degree of country/region cooperation rising to 23.06 by 1 June. There was also a clear core-periphery structure to international collaboration. Institutional collaboration was shown to be highly regionalized. The data reveal a high and growing incidence of international collaboration on the pandemic.