Volume 40, Fall 2020
MURJ
UROP Summaries
Comparison of COVID-19 Innovation Between the United States, Europe, and China Malhaar Agrawal1, Jonathan Gruber2 1 Student Contributor, MIT Department of Biology, Cambridge, MA 02139 2 Principal Investigator, Ford Professor of Economics, MIT Department of Economics, Cambridge, MA 02139
1. Background We sought to determine which region, People’s Republic of China (China), the United States of America (US) or Europe (as defined by the World Health Organization) (WHO, 2020) has been more “innovative” during the COVID-19 epidemic over time, as measured by searching the full content of peer-reviewed scholarly work on COVID-19 produced from January to November 2020.
2. Methodology We analyzed the iSearch COVID-19 platform (NIH’s comprehensive, expert-curated source for publications and preprints related to either COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2) for research articles in several key categories and subcategories from January to November (NIH, 2020). All COVID-related research articles were sorted by country of origin at 4 time points (the last date of March, June, September and November). US, European and Chinese (including Hong Kong and Macau) institutions were separated while all remaining countries were designated as “Other.” These research articles were further filtered by publication in the 16 top medical journals worldwide by highest H-index, excluding non-medical journals (Nature, Science, Cell, Lancet, PNAS, JAMA, Nature Medicine, Clinical Infectious Disease, Clinical Virology, Medical Virology, European Respiratory Journal, Lancet Infectious Disease, Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Critical Care, Infection, Head and Neck) (SJR, 2020).
articles per citizen calculation was a calculated average from the 4 timepoints during the pandemic.
3. Results & Conclusions The total number of articles in the Top T16 journals until the end of March was 1,065, June was 5,725, September was 9,100 and November was 10,011. The number of articles published by Chinese researchers were initially 69% greater than the United States and 45% greater than Europe; they were narrowly overtaken in June (19%) by the United States, a deficit which expanded by September (118%) when Europe also overtook China (52%) (Figure 1). By November, the US had the greatest number of research articles, followed by Europe and then China. Number of research articles closely follow each nation’s respective patient
Research articles were divided based on 3 clinically relevant categories: Therapeutics (Remdesivir, Methylprednisolone), nonTherapeutics (Swabs, Masks) and Biological Mechanisms of Action (Oxygen, ACE-2, Immunoglobulins, D-Dimer). Nonresearch articles, such as Reviews, Editorials, Personal Narrative, Case Reports, News and Practice Guidelines were excluded from this analysis. A full list of institutions of primary author affiliations for each article was imported into Google Sheets, and the number of articles indexed to each primary institution was recorded. Each institution was categorized by country of origin through ezGeocoding (https://geocode.ez34.net/), and total number of publications per country was calculated. Linear regression and normalization was performed in Microsoft Excel (Version 2020). Population data was aggregated from the World Bank (World Bank, 2020). Number of 18
Figure 1. Total number of COVID-related articles from Top 16 global journals (T16) at 4 time points during the COVID-19 pandemic. Published research from China was overtaken by the US in June and Europe in September.
