Coronavírus: Explorando o tema através da bibliometria

Abstract

Coronavirus has become a crosscutting theme for several communities: scientific, political, social, and economic. In particular, COVID-19 emerged at the end of 2019 and represents a serious global threat, with an impact on public health, in the search for vaccine and treatment, in strategies to prevent the spread of infection, in travel, in business, at work and social behaviors. To collect relevant scientific information about what is a coronavirus, this article presents a bibliometric analysis of data collected from Scopus. An exploratory analysis was carried out, based on the metadata of 20,438 documents, from 1951 to March 2020. The data were treated with the support of CiteSpace that allowed us to obtain a global view of the evolution of publications, the co-citation network, cluster subjects, and the most cited documents. The results obtained can be a solid starting point for further exploration. Thus, bibliometrics can contribute to the guarantee of information quality, an indispensable condition for the scientific development of a given theme. In addition to these information users, journalists and policymakers and educational and organizational managers should also consider bibliometrics as an evidence-based decision-making tool.