The research conducted by Dr. Satoshi Funada (Current affiliation: Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Keio University School of Medicine), Dr. Yan Luo (Current affiliation: Medical Education Center), and Professor Toshiaki Furukawa from Department of Health Promotion and Human Behavior was reported by Nikkei on December 28th, 2023.
In order to prepare for another pandemic of infectious diseases, the newspaper reported how the Government, academic institutions and industries should cooperate with each other. In the report, it was suggested that Japan was behind other countries in the research field about COVID-19. The thesis published by Dr. Funada, Dr. Luo and Professor Furukawa was cited in the report.
In their research, they analyzed theses on COVID-19 which were published between January 2020 and December 2022 and were highly cited by researchers over the last two months to rank in the top 0.1% by citations in each field. When they analyzed the shifts in trends across countries, they found that most theses were published from China at the early stage of the pandemic, but gradually this tendency decreased, and more theses were published from the US and the UK. They also showed that the number of the highly cited studies related to COVID-19 decreased in 2022.
Japan ranked 9th in the number of highly cited studies on COVID-19 between March and April 2020 and ranked between 14th and 23rd since then, which was not commented in the thesis.
Global Trends in Highly Cited Studies in COVID-19 Research
The newspaper report by Nikkei
東京大学など、国産ワクチン迅速開発へ　コロナ機に次の感染症備え – 日本経済新聞 (nikkei.com)