Sub-Saharan African Countries’ COVID-19 Research for 2020 from Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed

COVID-19 research records of all the 46 Sub-Saharan African countries were retrieved from Scopus, MEDLINE and Web of Science databases. The search was done on Jan 1 2021, to capture publications in 2020, with an update in April 2021, having noticed an increment in the number of publications in 2020. The search query was composed to retrieve publications on COVID-19 that were published by authors who are affiliated with institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. The search query included the names of all the 46 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Variants of the Sub-Saharan African countries' names (e.g. Cameroun and Cameroon) were also included so that indexes with their variant names would be captured. All the variant names of COVID-19, as specified in peer-reviewed search strings of the Medical Library Association for bibliographic database retrieval of COVID-19 publications, were also included in the search query (24). At the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, before the World Health Organization (WHO) assigned a globally recognized name, COVID-19 disease was called different names such as Wuhan coronavirus, Hubei coronavirus, China coronavirus, 2019 novel coronavirus disease, 2019-nCoV disease and Chinese Coronavirus, these names were included in our search query so that scientific publications that used such names were retrieved. Some of the names that were given to COVID-19 disease were later regarded as unethical because of their discriminatory tendencies.