Ali Mona Farouk
Department of Information Science, Faculty of Arts, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt.
Scientometrics. 2022;127(6):3083-3115. doi: 10.1007/s11192-022-04391-w. Epub 2022 Jun 7.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that began in the winter of 2020, all communities and activities globally have been positively or negatively affected. This scientometric study raises an interesting question concerning whether the volume and characteristics of scientific publishing in all disciplines in 23 Mediterranean countries have been impacted by the pandemic and whether variations in the cumulative totals of COVID-19 cases have resulted in significant changes in this context. The Scopus database and SciVal tool supplied the necessary data for the years targeted for comparison (2019 and 2020), and the annual growth rates and differences were computed. The study used the Mann-Whitney test to examine the significance of the differences between the two years and the Spearman and Kendall correlation tests to evaluate the effect of the number of infections on these differences for all aspects of scientific performance. The findings demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic served as a powerful incentive, and the Mediterranean region experienced considerable differences in the volume and features of publications during this crisis. The most substantial implications were the significant growth from 3.1 to 9.4% in productivity and the increases in the annual growth rates of international collaboration, by 12% for the collaboration among Mediterranean countries and 10% for collaboration with the top ten epidemic countries. It was also proven that some characteristics of the publications were positively correlated with the total number of infections. This investigation can help university leaders and decision-makers in higher education and research institutions in these countries make decisions and implement measures to bridge the gaps and motivate researchers in all fields to conduct more research during this ongoing pandemic.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-022-04391-w.
由于始于2020年冬季的持续新冠疫情，全球所有社区和活动都受到了积极或消极的影响。这项科学计量学研究提出了一个有趣的问题，即23个地中海国家所有学科的科学出版量和特征是否受到了疫情的影响，以及新冠病例累计总数的变化是否在这种情况下导致了显著变化。Scopus数据库和SciVal工具提供了用于比较的目标年份（2019年和2020年）的必要数据，并计算了年增长率和差异。该研究使用曼-惠特尼检验来检验两年间差异的显著性，并使用斯皮尔曼和肯德尔相关性检验来评估感染数量对科学表现各方面差异的影响。研究结果表明，新冠疫情起到了强大的激励作用，地中海地区在这场危机期间的出版物数量和特征出现了相当大的差异。最显著的影响是生产力从3.1%大幅增长至9.4%，以及国际合作年增长率的提高，地中海国家之间的合作增长了12%，与十大疫情国家的合作增长了10%。还证明了出版物的一些特征与感染总数呈正相关。这项调查可以帮助这些国家的大学领导以及高等教育和研究机构的决策者做出决策并采取措施弥合差距，激励所有领域的研究人员在这场持续的疫情期间开展更多研究。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s11192-022-04391-w获取的补充材料。
