Find the latest Covid-19 research papers.
Hi there, I'm not sure this service is of so much use now, so I've not been keeping it up to date and I will probably shut it down soon. If you still need it, just let me know.
We've got some...
Many thanks to Digital Ocean for providing us some free credits to help pay for our cloud server infrastructure!
And also to Open Access Button and
Cottage Labs for making time to enable this
work, and to Wikidata for their work and the images used here.
Searching Covid papers
Search for anything that could be related to covid-19 in all the latest research. For example find papers about underlying health conditions by typing the name of that condition. Or find papers about a certain location, treatment, etc.
There are dropdown filters for authors, journals, and keywords. The search/settings icon next to the search bar shows any currently available advanced options (these are in development). The search box accepts complex queries using elasticsearch query string syntax. For example all closed access papers that mention fibrosis would be NOT url:* AND fibrosis. Use double quotes to combine multi-word strings, e.g. "reactive oxygen species".
How this works
We query academic search APIs for covid, then combine all the results to make it easy to search, and display it in order of most recent publication. We check every couple of hours for new publications. We know some sources include other ones, and can include other institutional repositories, so we merge and deduplicate everything to get the best possible coverage and metadata. The sources we currently use are:
- crossref (most academic journals)
- europepmc (life sciences)
- DOAJ (open access journals)
- medRxiv (medicine and bioRxiv bioscience preprints)
- pubmed (life sciences)
- zenodo (any research)
- arXiv (physics preprints)
- BASE (covering institutional repos)
- CORE (covering institutional repos)
- figshare (any supporting materials)
- openaire (any open research)
We also check to see if the paper is open access. We use the Wellcome Trust Compliance checker to find the licence, and we use Unpaywall to check if a DOI has an open access link. If there is no DOI we search Open Access Button by title. We display open paper links with each open article. For closed ones we show a go to paper link , along with options to request paper or share your paper via Open Access Button. There's also a link to show more details and options for each article.
We're currently working on retrieving the full text and analysing them for more useful search terms, MeSH headings, molecules, proteins, processes, etc. Read further down for progress info.
Are these sources and articles reliable?
The sources we search are well respected. Some of the materials will be preprints rather than published, peer-reviewed articles though. Some sources indicate that the articles are peer-reviewed, while others state that they are not. There isn't a way yet to filter to show only peer-reviewed papers, but you can look at the sources to find out. If you want to tell us an article has been peer reviewed, or provide peer review for an article we have listed, please do! We would like to make this more useful in any way possible.
Let us know if you can help with peer review.
It's possible we've made a mistake or that one of our sources has some wrong data in it. If you spot an incorrect article, of if you can tell us more about an article, please do! Each article will have a Report problem button in the Analysis section.
Maybe your article has been published and is relevant to Covid, but we don't yet have it listed here. If so, it will likely show up soon. Or if your article is published but is not freely available anywhere, please use shareyourpaper.org from Open Access Button to get help with permissions and sharing an acceptable copy. Each article that we don't yet have an open link for will show a button to take you straight there.
Who made this?
Hi, I'm Mark. I was a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, then I was a founding partner of Cottage Labs, where I continue to consult on various projects with great organisations like the Directory of Open Access Journals and the National Institute of Materials Science. I am also the lead developer of Open Access Button. This service is running on various bits of software, some of which I wrote, many that others wrote, and all of which is open source. It runs on Cottage Labs infrastructure, and makes use of the other sources and services mentioned above.
Why did you make it? Don't you know about X, Y, Z already doing similar things?
I did it to feel pretty. Sorry, I mean, to feel useful.
- Some of my family have underlying health conditions and I want to know as soon as there are findings relevant to them.
- Searching all these sources isn't too hard but requires a fair bit of domain knowledge. I wanted to use my knowledge to do something useful for other people.
- I wanted to learn more about asymptomatic spreading. I had an eye infection, and with all the records in one place, I was able to find out that is a possible indicator just by typing conjunctivitis into the search box.
- I wanted to make sure all researchers, and anyone who might need to, can find and access as much of the relevant literature as quickly and easily as possible.
Yes, I'm aware of some great tools that already exist - all the sources already listed above, of course, and search tools like Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. Here's a list of some of my favourites:
- Coronavirus tech handbook
- World-o-meter coronavirus stats
- UCL covid-19 worldwide growth rates
- Nextstrain covid genetic epidemiology visualisation
- Semantic Scholar coronavirus research dataset
- medRxiv / bioRxiv covid preprint collection
- NCBI LitCovid research hub
Some other resources provide access to many more papers about coronavirus in general - publishers have made a collection of over 40,000 related papers available in the Semantic Scholar dataset, for example; but I wanted to search for new covid-specific papers. However it could be useful to do something with related papers as well - what do you think? I may index all the papers that the main ones refer to, or all papers with related terms in them apart from just covid.
Let me know if you have any suggestions.
New features coming soon
(maybe, as soon as I can - there is a lot going on)
- get full texts (done but improving )
- text/entity analysis (done but improving )
- MeSH headings extraction (done)
- graphs and charts (in progress)
- supporting/enabling peer review (just a link for now)
- list and get referenced papers (started but no time for progress yet)
- UI improvements (nah it's perfect already! - in progress)
Contribute
There is an API, but it is not documented yet, coming soon. If anyone wants to, I could give out an API key that would allow you to submit articles or analysis of articles. So if you have some kind of analysis you can run yourself, I think that is easier than contributing to a codebase right now - just do your own thing, contact me for a key, and then you can send your analysis over to my API to get added to the index.
I don't have enough time to add more here right now, get in touch if you want to know more.
Attribution
Any articles you use should be attributed directly in the usual way.
If this site has been useful you can attribute us too, using the covidpapers.com domain name. The author name is Mark MacGillivray
Get in touch if you want more details about the analysis work going on here, or about using and attributing our data directly. Offers to support this service to keep it running are also welcome!
I'm making some graphs and visualisations in case they are useful,
let me know if you have any suggestions. They'll be listed here once available.
Network graph: a useful way to explore the data, to see relations between different entities in the research papers. For example, remdesivir has been in the news lately, try selecting it from the drugs filter to view the relation between it and other drugs and diseases, and the papers that mention them.
Time series graphs coming soon...
