Scientists are drowning in COVID-19 papers. Can new tools keep them afloat?
Jeffrey Brainard
Abstract
Timothy Sheahan, a virologist studying COVID-19, wishes he could keep pace with the growing torrent of new scientific papers about the disease and the novel coronavirus that causes it But there are just too many—more than 4000 alone last week “I’m not keeping up,” says Sheahan, who works at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill “It’s impossible ” A loose-knit army of data scientists, software developers, and journal publishers is pressing hard to change that Backed by large technology firms and the White House, they are racing to create digital collections holding thousands of freely available papers that could be useful to ending the pandemic, and scrambling to build data-mining and search tools that can help researchers quickly find the information they seek And the urgency is growing: By one estimate, the COVID-19 literature published since January has reached more than 23,000 papers and is doubling every 20 days—among the biggest explosions of scientific literature ever