Features and Limitations of LitCovid Hub for Quick Access to Literature About COVID-19
Morteza Arab‐Zozani, Soheil Hassanipour
Abstract
To the Editor, In mid-December 2019, an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which began in Wuhan, China, has spread throughout the country and COVID-19 was announced as a pandemic disease (1).Obtaining the right evidence in the shortest possible time has always been a concern for researchers, policymakers, and decision-makers, especially in times of crisis (2).From the very first days, researchers started to publish articles about COVID-19, and the number of articles increased daily.Also, various publications have devoted sections to the disease and tried to provide up-to-date information.Since searching databases require special skills, accessing the articles related to this diseases is not easy, and initiatives in this area can be essential in terms of obtaining accurate and timely information (3).One of the most interesting initiatives, which started in the early days, was the launch of a dedicated LitCovid hub in PubMed (available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/) to track and gather up-to-date information about 2019 novel coronavirus.The hub has unique features and covers almost a high percentage of articles published about COVID-19 (4).This hub is updated daily with newly published articles and includes the most comprehensive collection of international research papers so far on the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19.According to the authors, this hub has a more sophisticated search function than available resources and identifies about 35% more relevant articles compared to formal keyword-based searches for entries such as COVID-19, nCOV, 2019-nCoV, and other related search terms.Also, the articles available on this hub are categorized by several topics, including general information (general information and news), mechanism (symptoms, clinical characteristics, and findings from sequence and image analysis), transmission (characteristics and modes of COVID-19 transmission, such as human-to-human), treatment (treatment strategies, therapeutic procedures, and vaccine development), case reports (descriptions of specific patient cases), and epidemic forecasting (modeling and estimating the trend of COVID-19 spread) (4).