COVIDScholar: An automated COVID-19 research aggregation and analysis platform.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic produced far-reaching effects throughout society, and science is no exception. The scale, speed, and breadth of the scientific community's COVID-19 response lead to the emergence of new research at the remarkable rate of more than 250 papers published per day. This posed a challenge for the scientific community as traditional methods of engagement with the literature were strained by the volume of new research being produced. Meanwhile, the urgency of response lead to an increasingly prominent role for preprint servers and a diffusion of relevant research through many channels simultaneously. These factors created a need for new tools to change the way scientific literature is organized and found by researchers. With this challenge in mind, we present an overview of COVIDScholar https://covidscholar.org, an automated knowledge portal which utilizes natural language processing (NLP) that was built to meet these urgent needs. The search interface for this corpus of more than 260,000 research articles, patents, and clinical trials served more than 33,000 users at an average of 2,000 monthly active users and a peak of more than 8,600 weekly active users in the summer of 2020. Additionally, we include an analysis of trends in COVID-19 research over the course of the pandemic with a particular focus on the first 10 months, which represents a unique period of rapid worldwide shift in scientific attention.

Online Interactive Platform for COVID-19 Literature Visual Analytics: Platform Development Study.

BACKGROUND: Papers on COVID-19 are being published at a high rate and concern many different topics. Innovative tools are needed to aid researchers to find patterns in this vast amount of literature to identify subsets of interest in an automated fashion. OBJECTIVE: We present a new online software resource with a friendly user interface that allows users to query and interact with visual representations of relationships between publications. METHODS: We publicly released an application called PLATIPUS (Publication Literature Analysis and Text Interaction Platform for User Studies) that allows researchers to interact with literature supplied by COVIDScholar via a visual analytics platform. This tool contains standard filtering capabilities based on authors, journals, high-level categories, and various research-specific details via natural language processing and dozens of customizable visualizations that dynamically update from a researcher's query. RESULTS: PLATIPUS is available online and currently links to over 100,000 publications and is still growing. This application has the potential to transform how COVID-19 researchers use public literature to enable their research. CONCLUSIONS: The PLATIPUS application provides the end user with a variety of ways to search, filter, and visualize over 100,00 COVID-19 publications.