Global COVID-19 Research Networks: Collaboration and Authorship Trends (2024–2025)

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered profound and unprecedented changes across nearly all facets of daily life, exposing what may be one of the most significant global crises in modern history. In response to this disruption, this study seeks to offer thematic and methodological insights for the development of sustainable research agendas. It does so through a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of scholarly publications that focus on the domains of management, leadership, and administration in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study investigates authorship patterns and collaborative research in COVID-19 literature, based on an analysis of 10,572 research papers published between 2024 and 2025. Data were sourced from the Scopus database and analyzed using Microsoft Excel. The findings reveal a strong trend toward multi-authored publications, reflecting the highly collaborative nature of pandemic-related research. This widespread cooperation was driven by the global scope, complexity, and urgency of the health crisis. Despite the overall dominance of collaborative work, single-author contributions were also notable in terms of productivity patterns. These results highlight the critical role of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration in advancing scientific knowledge during a public health emergency and offer valuable insights into evolving trends in research authorship and productivity.

Introduction

The text presents a bibliometric study examining authorship patterns, productivity, and collaboration in COVID-19 research, emphasizing their importance for understanding academic communication and scientific impact. Authorship analysis reveals how researchers collaborate, how institutions contribute, and how research domains evolve—an especially critical task during a global health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered rapid, large-scale, and highly collaborative scientific output.

The study focuses on COVID-19 literature published between 2024 and 2025, with data exclusively drawn from the Scopus database and limited to publications affiliated with Indian authors and institutions. A total of 10,572 documents were identified, with 1,000 highly cited articles selected for detailed authorship analysis. Bibliometric indicators were used to evaluate publication trends, productive authors, institutions, countries, research fields, collaboration networks, and thematic developments.

Findings show that COVID-19 research is overwhelmingly collaborative. Only 1.7% of papers were single-authored, while the majority involved multiple authors, often large teams. The calculated degree of collaboration was 0.983, indicating extremely high levels of co-authorship, reflecting the multidisciplinary and cooperative nature of pandemic research.

The study also reviews prior bibliometric and scientometric research, highlighting similar trends of increasing collaboration across disciplines and countries, particularly during global crises. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that COVID-19 research in India during 2024–2025 was characterized by intensive collaboration, high productivity, and significant contributions to global scientific knowledge and public health responses.

Conclusion

This bibliometric study emphasises the evolving nature of Indian COVID-19 research in 2024–2025. The results emphasize a clear inclination toward cooperative, multidisciplinary research, with Medicine and Computer Science identified as key fields. The significant level of collaboration showcases a developing research culture in India that prioritizes teamwork, collective resources, and collaborative problem-solving to tackle intricate global health challenges. Additionally, the research highlights the primary importance of English, the concentration of academic output in a limited number of leading institutions, and the considerable impact of highly referenced authors and articles featured in prestigious journals. The observed temporal and thematic patterns serve as a guide for understanding how Indian researchers responded to a global crisis and how academic communication evolved during this period. These findings provide important direction for policymakers, funding bodies, and educational institutions in developing future research priorities, promoting global collaboration, and increasing the visibility and influence of Indian science on the world stage.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Deepika Tandon, Monika , Jyotsna Makol. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.