THE MAIN TRENDS OF PUBLICATION ACTIVITY ON TOPICS RELATED TO INFECTIOUS DISEASES: COVID, SARS, EBOLA AND BIRD FLU

The article contains a scientometric analysis of publications indexed in the international citation database Scopus. Groups of publications containing the keywords COVID / COVID-19, the SARS virus that causes it, as well as publications on pandemics caused by Ebola and bird flu / avian influenza (various options combined by the search query "bird* flu") were considered. It was supposed to identify groups of links between the development of diseases and the dynamics of publication activity on the relevant topic, to analyze the samples of publications formed by sequential (two- and three-stage) search queries. In addition to the dynamics of the number of publications, distributions were analyzed by a) fields of knowledge (branches of science), b) by a set of keywords associated with a specified area, c) by nationality of authors and, in relation to authors from Russia, the significance of the contribution of organizations to the sample of publications. Due to the current quantitative changes in the number of publications for the period of material selection (mid-March—late June 2021), some quantitative estimates may change slightly. At the same time, the qualitative conclusions are preserved. For the most part, the findings appear to be expected.