Visibility, collaboration and impact of the Cuban scientific output on COVID-19 in Scopus

An observational, descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted through a bibliometric analysis of Cuban scientific output on COVID-19, published in journals indexed in Scopus. The following bibliometric indicators were studied: -Number of documents (Ndoc). Total number of documents in which at least one of the authors is affiliated with a Cuban institution. -Percentage of documents (% Ndoc) with respect to the total of the studied articles. -Citations (NCit). Total citations received by articles indexed in Scopus. -Cited articles (Cited doc). Total number of published articles that have been cited at least once according to Scopus. -Citations per document (Cpd). Average number of received citations. -Types of collaboration: ✓No collaboration (NoCollab). Documents in which a national institution appears, regardless of whether more than one author, group or department participates. ✓National collaboration (NC). Documents signed by more than one Cuban institution. ✓International Collaboration (IC). Documents in which the affiliation of their authors includes the address in more than one country. ✓International and National Collaboration (IC & NC). Documents signed by more than one Cuban institution and, at least, one foreign institution. -H-index. This index considers both the number of articles and the citations they receive. An author has an h = x index if he/she has x articles that have been cited at least x times [43]. This indicator is also used to characterize groups (a group of authors, a department, or a country). -Quartiles (Q). According to the SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR), the journals indexed in Scopus are placed in quartiles, where those in the first quartile have the highest impact. There are journals that do not appear in the ranking (non-ranked) due to their recent inclusion in the database [44]. -High-quality publications (% Q1). Percentage of publications in journals included in the quartile of maximum visibility. -Articles in Spanish (Ndoc Sp). Articles published in Spanish. -Articles in English (Ndoc Eng). Articles published in English. -Overlap (Ndoc Sp & Eng). Articles published in two languages, in this case, both in Spanish and English. -Scientific leadership (% Lead). Percentage of articles from a country in which the corresponding author belongs to a Cuban institution. These are referred to as lead documents [45]. -% Q1 Lead. Percentage of articles in journals included in the first quartile in which the corresponding author is affiliated with a Cuban institution. -% IC Lead. Percentage of articles in which the authors' affiliation includes the address of more than one country and the corresponding author is affiliated with a Cuban institution. Data collection and processing: To retrieve the publications, Scopus (http://www.scopus.com) was accessed on March 12, 2021, and an advanced search was performed using a filter by country (Cuba), source (journals) and type of articles (article and review). Most of the terms used for the search were extracted from previous bibliometric articles and the PubMed Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) related to the disease included in the MeSH catalog in its 2021 update were also used: COVID-19 vaccines, COVID-19 testing, COVID-19 serological testing and COVID-19 nucleic acid testing. The search strategy we used is shown in Table 1. Search strategy. Operator Field Search term TITLE-ABS-KEY 2019 ncov, 2019 novel coronavirus, 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-ncov), 2019 novel coronavirus disease, 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia, 2019-nCoV, 2019-novel CoV, coronavirus 2019, coronavirus disease 2019, cov-19, covid, COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines, COVID-19 testing, COVID-19 serological testing, COVID-19 nucleic acid testing, covid-19 diagnosis, covid-19 pandemic, covid-19 pneumonia, COVID-19 virus infection, covid-2019 epidemic, ncov-2019, new coronavirus, novel coronavirus, novel coronavirus outbreak, novel coronavirus pneumonia, SARS-CoV-2, sars-cov-2 infection, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, Wuhan coronavirus AND SRCTYPE j AND AFFILCOUNTRY Cuba AND LIMIT-TO DOCTYPE, "ar" OR DOCTYPE, "re" Initially, 134 articles with Cuban authorship were retrieved and after normalization, one article related to dramaturgy was eliminated, which had the term COVID-19 in the abstract and was published in the Theatre Journal. Similarly, 45 articles published in English were detected, and after a manual review it was found that six of these had been published in Spanish. In regard to Latin American scientific output, the same filters were used as in the previous strategy and we could obtain information corresponding to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela. The SCImago Journal & Country Rank platform (http://www.scimagojr.com) was accessed to know the location of the journals by...