Coronavirus mapping in scientific publications: when science advances rapidly and collectively, is access to this knowledge open to society?

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating a global health emergency. Mapping this health emergency in scientific publications demands multiple approaches to obtain a picture as complete as possible. To progress in the knowledge of this pandemic and to control its effects, international collaborations between researchers are essentials, as well as having open and immediate access to scientific publications, what we called “coopetition”. The following questions have been addressed: Which are the countries with the most scientific publications, how do organizations collaborate (international scientific collaborations) and how much impact can be observed? What percentage of these publications and cited references are open access (identifying countries and organizations)?We have analyzed 18,875 articles indexed in Web of Science. We performed the descriptive statistical analysis in order to explore the performance of the more prolific countries and organizations, as well as paying attention to the last two years. Registers have been analyzed separately via the VOSviewer software, drawing a network of links among countries and organizations to identify the starred countries and organizations, and the strongest links of the net.We have explored the capacity of researchers to generate scientific knowledge about a health crisis emergency, and their global capacity to collaborate among them in a global emergency. We consider that science is moving rapidly to find solutions to international health problems but access to this knowledge by society is not so quick due to several limitations (open access policies, corporate interests, etc.). We have observed that papers from China in the last 3 months (from January 2020 to March 2020) have a strong impact compared with papers published in years before. The United States and China are the major producers of documents of our sample, followed by all European countries, especially the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. At the same time, the leading role of Saudi Arabia, Canada or South Korea should be noted, with a significant number of documents submitted but very different dynamics of international collaboration.

World Health and World Politics

The nations of the modern world community have been working together on international health problems for a century and a half. They have collaborated because they have realized that disease does not respect national boundaries. In doing so, these states have learned that their selfinterests are best served by world-wide collective action to eradicate communicable disease and to promote positive health conditions everywhere.