The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has sickened more than six million people worldwide. This context has led to an abundance of publications quickly since the beginning of the outbreak. In a few months, thousands of scientific papers have appeared. This article aims to provide a bibliometric analysis of the publications on COVID-19 in five high-impact journals indexed to the Web of Science Core Collection's Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) including The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, and JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association. We found 169 documents associated with the search criteria. The findings indicate that China, the United States, and the United Kingdom are the most represented countries in these publications, The Lancet is the journal with the highest number of contributions with 66% of documents, and the University of Hong Kong leads the ranking of institutions. Future bibliometric and scientometric studies on COVID-19 should provide updated information to analyse other relevant indicators in this field.