Özet:

Aim: The 21st Century has already witnessed three outbreaks caused by the same family of coronaviruses, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and recently, The Noval Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). The main aim of this study is to analyze the overall scientific publications indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) about these three outbreaks. And the secondary aim is to compare first scientific reactions to SARS, MERS and COVID-19 outbreaks in their early phases by using the dates of first 4 months of them. Material and Method: Web of Science (WoS) software was used for the search and the analysis. Allscientific papers, included in SCI-E, related with each outbreaks of SARS, MERS and COVID-19 from 1980 to April15.2020, were searched and analyzed by using the terms of “SARS”, “SARS-CoV” and “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome” for SARS; “MERS”, “MERS-CoV”, “HCoV-EMC” and “Middle East Respiratory Disease” for MERS and “COVID-19”, “2019-n-CoV”, “SARS-CoV-2”, “Coronavirus disease 19” and “2019 novel coronavirus” for COVID-19 in the topic section of the software. Results: Overall; 3690, 1517 and 730 papers, indexed by SCI-E, were found related to SARS, MERS and COVID-19 respectively. The biggest contribution for publications was from People’s Republic of China (PRC) for SARS and COVID-19 and was from The United States of America (USA) for MERS. Conclusion: In this study, it was revealed that scientific contribution to COVID-19 is faster and greatful then SARS and MERS in the early phase of the outbreak. But the pandemic potential of betacoronaviruses, especially SARS-CoV-2, remains a threat for public health globally. Therefore further research into the pathogenesis of these infections in order to find appropriate targets for treatment is imperative.