Abstract:

The global health crisis that started in December 2019 resulted in an outbreak of coronavirus named COVID-19. Scientists worldwide are working to demystify the transmission and pathogenic mechanisms of the deadly coronavirus. The World Health Organization has declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, which makes it essential to track and analyse the research state of COVID-19 for guidance on further research. This research was conducted using scientometric analysis, knowledge-mapping analysis, COVID-19 studies and journal classifications. The publications used in this study include over 3000 COVID-19 papers made available to the public from 1 January 2018 to 15 April 2021 in the PubMed databases. In this study, it was discovered that the rapid reaction of researchers worldwide resulted in a fast growth trend between 2019 and 2021 in the number of publications related to COVID-19. It was discovered that the largest number of studies is in the United States of America, which is one of the countries most affected by a pandemic. The method adopted for this study involved the use of documents such as Case Reports (CAT), Journal Article (JAT), letter (LTR), EAT, and Editorial (EDT). This is followed by the classification of COVID-19 related publications that were retrieved from PubMed between 2019 and 2021 using machine learning (ML) models such as Naïve Bayes (NB), Bayesian Generalized Linear Model (BGL), Heteroscedastic Discriminant Analysis (HDA) and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MAR). Simulation results show that the classification accuracy of MAR is better than that of other ML models used in this study. The sensitivity of the MAR is within the range of 100%. This shows that MAR performs better than NB, BGL and HDA. MAR performs better with an overall accuracy of 89.62%. Our results show a high degree of strong collaboration in coronavirus research and the exchange of knowledge in the global scientific community.

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