COVID19 Preprint Tracker Platform
Principal Investigator : Guillaume CABANAC
Context
During the Spring 2020 lockdown, the CNRS Institute of information sciences and their interactions (InS2I) via its DAS Mokrane Bouzeghoub mobilized six teams from CNRS UMRs on COVID-related issues19 involving data science and information retrieval. INS2I has linked the IRIS team with epidemiologists from CRESS (UMR 1153 INSERM). The latter carry out a real-time review of the scientific literature (living systematic review) of the COVID19 and their results are published on https://covid-nma.com and used by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Issue
The urgency of the COVID19 pandemic has pushed biomedical researchers to revolutionize their scientific communication practices. Traditionally conservative (submission to a scientific journal results already communicated was disallowed), they have for the first time massively posted their scientific results on preprint platforms (mainly medrxiv.org and biorxiv.org). As a result, CRESS epidemiologists had to adapt their scientific monitoring approach to: identify preprints of interest, track updates of these preprints (by determining the result elements that have evolved) and identify possible publications in peer-reviewed journals in fine. This is a daily task that CRESS performed manually for the hundreds of preprints tracked, work that is essential for updating the knowledge base that CRESS maintains and disseminates to decision makers (WHO) and the public. The effort dedicated to this task was no longer sustainable with the growing number of new preprints to be processed each day.
Realization
We have designed and developed preprint tracking algorithms that identify new releases on a daily basis and link published preprints to the resulting articles as soon as they are published (Cabanac et al., 2021). Articles and preprints are also contextualized by citation indicators in the academic sphere and visibility in the public sphere (Altmetrics attention indicator and PubPeer indicators to detect scientific controversies and whistleblowers). These elements are centralized in an online dashboard that is updated daily and used daily by epidemiologists (Oikonomidi et al., 2020)
Users
CRESS epidemiologists and, indirectly, WHO and those who benefit from health recommendations for COVID19 based on CRESS findings.