Abstract
The spontaneous nature of health emergencies and disasters (HED) require research prioritization and preparedness from multidisciplinary sectors such as the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that has become a center of attention to the research community globally. This study aims at assessing global research evolution, precedence, and preparedness toward combating the COVID-19 pandemic via systematic analysis of published studies. We retrieved COVID-19 studies from Scopus and Web of Science databases from January 01, 2020, to March 23, 2020, according to the PRISMA guidelines using the search term “COVID-19 OR coronavir∗”. The dataset was analyzed for productivity indices, conceptual frameworks (CFs), discipline, and collaboration networks (CNs). Results revealed a total of 817 studies on COVID-19. The top two productive researchers include those by Wang Y. (3.55%) and Li Y. (2.94%). Among disciplines, virology (n = 40, 5 h-index), microbiology (n = 27, 2 h-index), immunology (n = 22), and infectious diseases (n = 21) were at the forefront. China (n = 181) and the United States (n = 69) ranked the first and second productive nations, respectively. Country CNs in COVID-19 can be clustered into four subnetworks. Also, four thematic areas evolved in COVID-19 research for the period, namely, epidemiologic studies of infectious bronchitis virus including coronavirus, elucidation of historical respiratory viral outbreaks, zoonoses and phylogenetic analysis, and influenza zoonosis; while the prevailing CFs of research prioritization ranged from comparative symptomatology of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV)-2 and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), perceptivity studies from SARS-CoV-1,2 outbreaks, antigenic structural studies for vaccine production to antibody therapeutic target studies. In conclusion, the COVID-19 research has received progressive attention since the beginning of the pandemic; however, this study recommends that integrative and multidisciplinary research priority and preparation should be channelled toward HED from all experimental and nonexperimental biases of knowledge.