LitCovid

If you’ve ever tried to search for medical literature, it is possible that you’ve used PubMed, a bibliographic database that contains more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. While it is possible to simply type a keyword or two and get search results, the ability to find what you’re looking for depends on your ability to leverage the rich metadata (e.g., medical subject headings, authors, publication dates, title words) that are associated with every citation.

Nowadays many people are searching PubMed for literature related to COVID-19. However, there is complexity in how research is performed and reported on the topic. For starters, the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the clinical disorder (COVID-19) are two entirely different things. To complicate matters, there are many variations in how people name and abbreviate both the virus and the clinical disorder. The search strings that you would need to enter just to capture literature related to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 can be complex. Enter LitCovid, a curated literature hub for tracking up-to-date scientific information about the 2019 novel Coronavirus. It is basically a subset of PubMed citations that is updated daily and contains 28,764 articles as of today, July 5, 2020.

LitCovid articles are captures using a 2-step process. The first step is to run the following search query against 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]

The second step is a machine learning-assisted human review process to identify relevant articles and to discard irrelevant search results.

All publications in LitCovid are manually tagged with up to 8 article categories

• General Information: General information and news
• Mechanism: Underlying cause(s) of COVID-19 infections and transmission & possible drug mechanism of action 
• Transmission: Characteristics and modes of COVID-19 transmissions, such as human-to-human
• Diagnosis: Disease assessment through symptoms, test results, and radiological features
• Treatment: Treatment strategies, therapeutic procedures, and vaccine development
• Prevention: Prevention, control, response and management strategies
• Case Report: Descriptions of specific patient cases
• Epidemic Forecasting: Modeling and estimating the trend of COVID-19 spread

Users can filter search results by clicking on these 8 article categories, as well as other filter criteria including Chemicals, Journals, and Countries.

In the FAQ, it is stated that LitCovid tracks publications specific to COVID-19, while the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset contains a broader set of coronavirus literature which includes SARS (caused by SARS-CoV-1) and MERS.