COVIDScholar: An automated COVID-19 research aggregation and analysis platform

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 18; no. 2; p. e0281147
• Main Authors: Dagdelen, John, Trewartha, Amalie, Huo, Haoyan, Fei, Yuxing, He, Tanjin, Cruse, Kevin, Wang, Zheren, Subramanian, Akshay, Justus, Benjamin, Ceder, Gerbrand, Persson, Kristin A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 01.02.2023; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: 60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES; Algorithms; Automation; Biology and life sciences; Clinical trials; Computer and Information Sciences; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Disease transmission; Epidemiology; Evaluation; Humanities; Humans; Information retrieval; Infrastructure; Keywords; Machine learning; Medical research; Medicine and Health Sciences; Medicine, Experimental; Metadata; Natural Language Processing; Pandemics; Physical sciences; Public health; Relevance; Researchers; Respiratory diseases; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; Social Sciences; Trends; Viruses; Web portals; United States
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281147

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic produced far-reaching effects throughout society, and science is no exception. The scale, speed, and breadth of the scientific community’s COVID-19 response lead to the emergence of new research at the remarkable rate of more than 250 papers published per day. This posed a challenge for the scientific community as traditional methods of engagement with the literature were strained by the volume of new research being produced. Meanwhile, the urgency of response lead to an increasingly prominent role for preprint servers and a diffusion of relevant research through many channels simultaneously. These factors created a need for new tools to change the way scientific literature is organized and found by researchers. With this challenge in mind, we present an overview of COVIDScholar https://covidscholar.org , an automated knowledge portal which utilizes natural language processing (NLP) that was built to meet these urgent needs. The search interface for this corpus of more than 260,000 research articles, patents, and clinical trials served more than 33,000 users at an average of 2,000 monthly active users and a peak of more than 8,600 weekly active users in the summer of 2020. Additionally, we include an analysis of trends in COVID-19 research over the course of the pandemic with a particular focus on the first 10 months, which represents a unique period of rapid worldwide shift in scientific attention.