Publishing volumes in major databases related to Covid-19

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, induced a global pandemic for which an effective cure, either in the form of a drug or vaccine, has yet to be discovered. In the few brief months that the world has known Covid-19, there has been an unprecedented volume of papers published related to this disease, either in a bid to find solutions, or to discuss applied or related aspects. Data from Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science, and Elsevier's Scopus, which do not index preprints, were assessed. Our estimates indicate that 23,634 unique documents, 9960 of which were in common to both databases, were published between January 1 and June 30, 2020. Publications include research articles, letters, editorials, notes and reviews. As one example, amongst the 21,542 documents in Scopus, 47.6% were research articles, 22.4% were letters, and the rest were reviews, editorials, notes and other. Based on both databases, the top three countries, ranked by volume of published papers, are the USA, China, and Italy while BMJ, Journal of Medical Virology and The Lancet published the largest number of Covid-19-related papers. This paper provides one snapshot of how the publishing landscape has evolved in the first six months of 2020 in response to this pandemic and discusses the risks associated with the speed of publications.

Corona exhaustion (CORONEX): COVID-19-induced exhaustion grinding down humanity

“…More attention is needed to drug abuse (Haley et al., 2020) and alcohol abuse ( Teixeira da Silva and Testino, 2020 ) that may arise absent suitable support infrastructures to deal with losses caused by COVID-19 and CORONEX. Academics, medics, policy makers and mental health practitioners also need to be able to discern validated facts from misinformation, and fact from opinion, when wading through thousands of papers, including pseudo-science, published in a sometimes indistinguishable milieu of preprints, peer-reviewed journals, and predatory venues ( Teixeira da Silva, 2020a ; Teixeira da Silva et al., 2020a , 2020b ).…”

Prehospital identification of Covid-19: an observational study

“…Despite the significant Covid-19 related scientific output [ 7 ], only a few studies describing the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on prehospital care systems are available [ 8 – 10 ], and these are largely limited to reports on the impact of the pandemic at the system-level. Only a single study has been published which quantitatively investigates the characteristics of Covid-19 patients and/or the ability of prehospital care providers to identify SARS-CoV-2-positive patients by linking prehospital data with subsequent hospital diagnoses [ 11 ].…”

Prehospital Identification of Covid-19: An Observational Study

“…Despite the signi cant Covid-19 related scienti c output (7), only a few studies describing the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on prehospital care systems are available (8)(9)(10), and these are largely limited to reports on the impact of the pandemic at the system-level. Only a single study has been published which quantitatively investigates the characteristics of Covid-19 patients and/or the ability of prehospital care providers to identify SARS-CoV-2-positive patients by linking prehospital data with subsequent hospital diagnoses (11).…”