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As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect our communities, the need for accurate and up-to-date information regarding the virus, reducing the risk of exposure, and potential therapeutics remains as important as ever.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes for Health (NIH) has created an open source curated literature hub for tracking scientific data related to the 2019 novel Coronavirus and remains the most comprehensive resource for this type of information. Started in the early days of the virus, LitCovid has grown to contain a total of over 69,700 open access articles related to COVID-19 and is being updated daily. This literature is collected via PubMed, a primarily biomedical database that is also maintained by the NLM. Anyone interested in using PubMed can head to our A-Z Databases list for access.
The literature compiled here is categorized by the following topics: General, Mechanism, Transmission, Diagnosis, Treatment, Prevention, Case Reports, and Epidemic Forecasting, making for easy retrieval of COVID-19 information within a certain context. These articles are published in journals such as Nature, Science, Lancet, Clinical Infectious Diseases, the Journal of Clinical Virology, and more. CCNY Libraries offers access to many of these journals, so those interested in browsing or searching them can use our Journals by Title page.
The LitCovid site also allows users to sort articles by chemical/drug, so you can easily see studies related specifically to Hydroxychloroquine or Remedisivr, as potential drugs in treating the virus.
Interestingly, LitCovid also shares the methods for aggregating relevant articles so that users can understand how the literature was retrieved and even replicate the search on their own. Those familiar with conducting database searches will recognize the “search string” below, which the NLM uses to retrieve COVID-19 -related literature from PubMed.
"Coronavirus"[All Fields] OR "ncov"[All Fields] OR "cov"[All Fields] OR "2019-nCoV"[All Fields] OR "COVID-19"[All Fields] OR "SARS-CoV-2"[All Fields]
Learn more about how the NLM identifies, retrieve, and categorize relevant material here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/faq
LitCovid not only aggregates these articles but also allows users to search within this literature. Performing a simple search for “vaccine” will show you the approximately 3,300+ articles related to COVID-19 vaccines that have been published since January 2020.
This comprehensive and freely available resource is invaluable for efforts to stay informed with timely, credible information.
Image 1: Figures numbers of showing weekly publications and countries mentioned in abstracts.
Image 2: LitCovid's RSS feed of the most recent publications related to COVID-19.
1 Comment.
Latest comment 2020-11-24T15:01:24-05:00 by Seamus Scanlon (O'Scanlain)