COVID-19 publications: Database coverage, citations, readers, tweets, news, Facebook walls, Reddit posts
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Issue Date
2020-09-04
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The COVID-19 pandemic requires a fast response from researchers to help address biological, medical and public health issues to minimize its impact. In this rapidly evolving context, scholars, professionals and the public may need to quickly identify important new studies. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during 21 March to 18 April 2020. The rapidly increasing volume of research, is particularly accessible through Dimensions, and less through Scopus, the Web of Science, and PubMed. Google Scholar’s results included many false matches. A few COVID-19 papers from the 21,395 in Dimensions were already highly cited, with substantial news and social media attention. For this topic, in contrast to previous studies, there seems to be a high degree of convergence between articles shared in the social web and citation counts, at least in the short term. In particular, articles that are extensively tweeted on the day first indexed are likely to be highly read and relatively highly cited three weeks later. Researchers needing wide scope literature searches (rather than health focused PubMed or medRxiv searches) should start with Dimensions (or Google Scholar) and can use tweet and Mendeley reader counts as indicators of likely importance.Citation
Kousha, K. and Thelwall, M. (2020) COVID-19 publications: Database coverage, citations, readers, tweets, news, Facebook walls, Reddit posts, Quantitative Science Studies 1 (3), pp. 1068-1091. DOI: 10.1162/qss_a_00066Publisher
MIT PressJournal
Quantitative Science StudiesAdditional Links
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/qss_a_00066Type
Journal articleLanguage
enDescription
© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00066ISSN
2641-3337ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1162/qss_a_00066
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/