COVID-19 will stimulate a new coronavirus research breakthrough: a 20-year bibliometric analysis.

Background: COVID-19 is currently rampant in China, causing unpredictable harm to humans. This study aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively investigate the research trends on coronaviruses using bibliometric analysis to identify new prevention strategies.

Methods: All relevant publications on coronaviruses were extracted from 2000-2020 from the Web of Science database. An online analysis platform of literature metrology, bibliographic item co-occurrence matrix builder (BICOMB) and CiteSpace software were used to analyse the publication trends. VOSviewer was used to analyse the keywords and research hotspots and compare COVID-19 information with SARS and MERS information.

Results: We found a total of 9,760 publications related to coronaviruses published from 2000 to 2020. The has been the most popular journal in this field over the past 20 years. The United States maintained a top position worldwide and has provided a pivotal influence, followed by China. Among all the institutions, the University of Hong Kong was regarded as a leader for research collaboration. Moreover, Professors Yuen KY and Peiris JSM made great achievements in coronavirus research. We analysed the keywords and identified 5 coronavirus research hotspot clusters.

Conclusions: We considered the publication information regarding different countries, institutions, authors, journals, etc. by summarizing the literature on coronaviruses over the past 20 years. We analysed the studies on COVID-19 and the SARS and MERS coronaviruses. Notably, COVID-19 must become the research hotspot of coronavirus research, and clinical research on COVID-19 may be the key to defeating this epidemic.