Himmelfarb Library Faculty Publications
The currency and completeness of specialized databases of COVID-19 publications.
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Date
3-24-2022
Journal
Journal of clinical epidemiology
Volume
147
DOI
10.1016/j.jclinepi.2022.03.006
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Several specialized collections of COVID-19 literature have been developed during the global health emergency. These include the WHO COVID-19 Global Literature Database, Cochrane COVID-19 Study Register, CAMARADES COVID-19 SOLES, Epistemonikos' COVID-19 L-OVE, and LitCovid. Our objective was to evaluate the completeness of these collections and to measure the time from when COVID-19 articles are posted to when they appear in the collections.
STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We tested each selected collection for the presence of 440 included studies from 25 COVID-19 systematic reviews. We sampled 112 journals and prospectively monitored their websites until a new COVID-19 article appeared. We then monitored for 2 weeks to see when the new articles appeared in each collection. PubMed served as a comparator.
RESULTS: Every collection provided at least one record not found in PubMed. Four records (1%) were not in any of the sources studied. Collections contained between 83% and 93% of the primary studies with the WHO database being the most complete. By 2 weeks, between 60% and 78% of tracked articles had appeared.
CONCLUSION: Our findings support the use of the best performing COVID-19 collections by systematic reviews to replace paywalled databases.
APA Citation
Butcher, R., Sampson, M., Couban, R., Malin, J., Loree, S., & Brody, S. (2022). The currency and completeness of specialized databases of COVID-19 publications.. Journal of clinical epidemiology, 147 (). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2022.03.006
Peer Reviewed
1
Open Access
1
