The 2020 research pandemic: A bibliometric analysis of publications on COVID-19 and their scientific impact during the first months.

Background: The outbreak of COVID-19 has created a landslide of publications, from different sources and unequal impact. We considered that the first 3 months are crucial to understand how knowledge has been generated by performing a bibliometric analysis, including the citations to these articles to guide researchers in exploring this field, and to evaluate the relationship between confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths with the number of papers per country.

Methods: Scientific publications were obtained from PubMed (January-March 2020) and their citations during the first 6 months retrieved from the Scopus database.