Scientific production on Covid-19 in Brazil: a scoping review

Abstract

Introduction: the national scientific production on Covid-19 has an immediate role in developing policies to tackle the disease and for guiding clinical decisions. Objective: to identify and characterize the scientific production on topics related to Covid-19 in national journals from articles published between December 1, 2019, and May 2, 2020. Method: scoping review, whose search for articles occurred in the SciELO Collection Brazil and on the websites of journal Visa em Debate and Ciência & Saúde Coletiva. The validated database was assessed by a simple quantitative analysis to provide numerical summaries of the characteristics of interest in the literature included in the review. Results: 58 (20.8%) articles from 22 national journals were included. The largest number of articles came from journals that developed fast publishing options or had been adopting a continuous flow publication model (n = 45; 77.6%). The distribution of articles in seven research categories was, in this order: Comment (n = 43; 74.1%), Descriptive study (n = 8; 13.8%), Literature review (n = 6; 10.4 %) and Analytical study (n = 1; 1.7%). Only one systematic review was found and the analytical study was classified as an ecological study. April concentrated 86.2% of the articles published, with the peak of publications occurring on April 9 (8 articles). Among 58 articles, "Social isolation, mental health and other aspects related to social behaviours” was the most prevalent theme (n = 14; 24.1%). Conclusions: this scoping review produced a map of scientific production in Brazil on Covid-19. There are important gaps, especially concerning randomized clinical trials and cohort studies, which need to be filled on further research in our country.