Review Article
Year: 2020 | Month: April-June | Volume: 5 | Issue: 2 | Pages: 205-214
A Scoping Review of Studies on COVID-19
Kuok Ho Daniel Tang
Health, Safety and Environment Programme, Curtin University Malaysia, CDT250, 98009 Miri, Sarawak, Malaysia.
ABSTRACT
The recent Covid-19 outbreak has spurred research activities in understanding its clinical characteristics, epidemiology, treatment and containment, hence resulting in a surge of publications related to the outbreak. This scoping review aims to provide insight into the overarching types and genres of studies on Covid-19 and highlight the gaps to be filled in by subsequent research. This study adopted the scoping frame of Arksey and O’Malley based on the PRISMA systematic review. It qualitatively analysed 587 scholarly articles published between December 2019 and 5 May 2020, which were drawn from ProQuest, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). The initial lists of articles passed through the four stages of the PRISMA, namely identification of literature, screening, eligibility assessment and inclusion to qualify for qualitative analysis. The review showed that descriptive studies predominated over analytic studies (84.3% versus 15.7%) and most of the studies (14.3%) were related to clinical signs and characteristics/ parthenogenesis. The understudied areas consisted of vaccines development, ecological/ environmental implications and forensic. This review highlights tremendous opportunities for research related to Covid-19 addressing the analytic aspects, the understudied areas as well as areas such as information technology (IT) and data processing, economics, social and psychological facets and risk assessment.
Keywords: Covid-19; SARS-CoV-2; public health; clinical; therapy; epidemiology