Abstract
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 identify important new studies quickly. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during March 21, 2020 to April 18, 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 3 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.
Highlights
The international scientific effort to mitigate COVID-19 is unprecedented in scale and rapidity
Lists of documents matching a set of COVID-19 queries were downloaded from Dimensions.ai and altmetrics for these were gathered from Mendeley (Gunn, 2014) and Altmetric.com (Adie & Roe, 2013; Robinson-García, TorresSalinas, et al, 2014) daily and the individual scores and documents compared
Based on the estimated number of manual search results returned by the sources queried, it seems that Dimensions has substantially wider coverage of COVID-19 publications than all other sources or finds more because of its full text indexing rather than just searching metadata (Figure 2)
Summary
The international scientific effort to mitigate COVID-19 is unprecedented in scale and rapidity. PubMed added related publications daily between January 17 and April 18, 20201 (Figure 1), reaching over 300 in a single day This effort is in response to the lethality and rapid spread of the disease, as well as the major economic and social consequences of COVID-19 lockdowns. As part of the response, researchers, professionals, and the public may need to consult the scientific literature for the latest findings This is normal for science, standard literature search methods may be ineffective in a rapid publishing environment. One recent study using Dimensions, Scopus, Web of Science ( WoS), and the LitCovid (Chen, Allot, & Lu, 2020) curated list has investigated the daily growth of COVID-19 related publications in citation databases and digital libraries from January 1 to April 7, finding that Dimensions had the best coverage (9,435 publications) compared to WoS (718) and Scopus (1,568). Google Scholar was not assessed, and all evidence was extracted from Dimensions, so the counts for other repositories may not be complete
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
