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Covid-19 has been an unprecedented challenge that disruptively reshaped societies and brought a massive amount of novel knowledge to the scientific community. However, as this knowledge flood has surged, researchers have been disadvantaged by not having access to a platform that can quickly synthesize rapidly emerging information and link the expertise it contains to established knowledge foundations. Aiming to fill this gap, in this paper we propose a research framework that can assist scientists in identifying, retrieving, and understanding Covid-19 knowledge from the ocean of scholarly articles. Incorporating Principal Component Decomposition (PDC), a knowledge model based on text analytics, and hierarchical topic tree analysis, the proposed framework profiles the research landscape, retrieves topic-specific knowledge and visualizes knowledge structures. Addressing 127,971 Covid-19 research papers from PubMed, our PCD topic analysis identifies 35 research hotspots, along with their correlations and trends. The hierarchical topic tree analysis further segments the knowledge landscape of the whole dataset into clinical and public health branches at a macro level. To supplement this analysis, we also built a knowledge model from research papers on vaccinations and fetched 92,286 pre-Covid publications as the established knowledge foundation for reference. The hierarchical topic tree analysis results on the retrieved papers show multiple relevant biomedical disciplines and four future research topics: monoclonal antibody treatments, vaccinations in diabetic patients, vaccine immunity effectiveness and durability, and vaccination-related allergic sensitization. 

Uncovering the driving forces, strategic landscapes, and evolutionary mechanisms of China’s research systems is attracting rising interest around the globe. One such interest is to understand the problem-solving patterns in China’s research systems now and in the future. Targeting a set of high-quality research articles published by Chinese researchers between 2009 and 2018, and indexed in the Essential Science Indicators database, we developed an intelligent bibliometrics-based methodology for identifying the problem-solving patterns from scientific documents. Specifically, science overlay maps incorporating link prediction were used to profile China’s disciplinary interactions and predict potential cross-disciplinary innovation at a macro level. We proposed a function incorporating word embedding techniques to represent subjects, actions, and objects (SAO) retrieved from combined titles and abstracts into vectors and constructed a tri-layer SAO network to visualize SAOs and their semantic relationships. Then, at a micro level, we developed network analytics for identifying problems and solutions from the SAO network, and recommending potential solutions for existing problems. Empirical insights derived from this study provide clues to understand China’s research strengths and the science policies beneath them, along with the key research problems and solutions Chinese researchers are focusing on now and might pursue in the future.