Surging publications on the COVID-19 pandemic

Few infectious diseases have posed such tremendous challenges as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which had swept across 216 countries or territories by 29 August 2020. In response, an unprecedented upsurge of research has been witnessed [1]. To assess the pattern and scale of COVID-19 research, we searched for ‘nCov’, ‘COVID-19’ or ‘SARS-CoV-2’ in Embase, MEDLINE and Cochrane CENTRAL databases through 31 March 2020 (see Supplementary material, Appendix S1). A total of 1431 out of 3780 publications were included and further manually divided into eight mutually exclusive categories with regards to research topics (Fig. 1a; Supplementary material, Table S1).