Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Review of Global Coronavirus Research Trends Before COVID-19: Prospects and Implications for COVID-19 Research

Coronaviruses (CoV) caused respiratory and intestinal infections. We conducted this bibliometric analysis and systematical review to explore the CoV-related research trends before COVID-19. Systematically searched the Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid Embase, and Web of Science (WOS) databases for published bibliometric analyses of CoV from database inception to January 24, 2021. WOS Collection was searched from inception to January 31, 2020 to acquire the CoV-related publications before COVID-19. One-Way ANOVA, and Bonferroni multiple-comparison tests were used to compare differences. Visualization mapping, and keywords cluster graph were made to illustrate the research topics and hotpots. We included 14,141 CoV-related publications for the bibliometric analysis and 16 (12 article) CoV-related bibliometric analyses for the systematic review. Both the systematic review and bibliometric analysis showed 1) the number of publications showed two steep upward trajectories in 2003-2004 and in 2012-2014; 2) the research hotpots mainly focused on the mechanism, pathology, epidemiology, clinical diagnosis and treatment of the coronavirus with MERS-CoV and SAS; 3) the USA, and China; the University of Hong Kong; and Yuen KY, came from the University of Hong Kong contributed most; 4) Journal of Virology had the largest number of CoV related studies. More researches should focus on prevention, diagnosis, and treatments in the future.