Who is contributing? Scientific collaborations on COVID-19

It took only four months from the discovery of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) to more than 2 million confirmed cases at the time of writing. The highly contagious COVID-19 has severely limited human activity and has proved difficult to conquer. When this outbreak was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020, it was apparent that global cooperation is the key or the only way to combat this pandemic (Berkley, 2020). In fact, practice has long proved that cooperation, especially scientific collaboration, is not only the leading force in the global exploration of cutting-edge science, but also the best way for the world to respond to issues such as resources and environment, climate change, health and public safety (Adams, 2013; Adams and Loach, 2015).

With regard to COVID-19, what is the current progress of scientific collaboration? And which countries (regions), cities or institutes engaged in promoting it? Co-authored publications are widely accepted as proxies of scientific collaboration or knowledge cooperation (Andersson et al., 2014; Gui et al., 2019). Due to the difference in the initial naming of the new coronavirus, the data here was retrieved from the Web of Science Core Citation Database through searching under four keywords: novel coronavirus, SRAS-CoV, 2019-nCoV and COVID-19. By identifying authors’ nations, cities and institutes, we visualized the scientific collaborations among countries (regions), cities and institutes on COVID-19 research as of April 15, 2020. The size of nodes, shown in Figure 1, is positively related to the number of collaborations among countries, cities or institutions. Nodes with the same color represent that they are in the same subgroup in the scientific cooperation network by community detection (Bassens et al., 2010; Newman, 2006).

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Figure 1.

Scientific collaborations among (a) countries (regions), (b) cities and (c) institutes on COVID-19 as of April 15, 2020.

As of April 15, 2020, 1265 articles, reviews, letters and so on have been jointly published in the literature by 1608 institutions in 752 cities from 84 countries (regions). In terms of cooperation, 77 countries (regions) have cooperated internationally 1180 times, 354 cities have cooperated 2052 times and 7192 institutional collaborations have been carried out by 1495 institutes. The international cooperation on COVID-19 research, shown in Figure 1(a), was dominated by China, USA and England, forming a tri-polar world, while the inter-city cooperation shown in Figure 1(b) was dominated by Beijing, China, which cooperated with 135 cities 1115 times. The institutional cooperation network was also dominated by Chinese universities and scientific research institutes (Figure 1(c)), such as Fudan University, Capital Medical University, the University of Hong Kong, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.