![]() ![]() ![]() It would therefore be helpful to assess whether altmetrics can perform this role. ![]() ![]() Thus, altmetrics may be useful in helping the public to identify the most relevant research or may help point researchers to topics considered important by the public. They may therefore share relevant academic research in the social web (e.g., Merchant & Lurie, 2020), generating interest that may picked up by alternative indicators (altmetrics). This may be in addition to, or to clarify, World Health Organization guidelines ( WHO, 2020). In parallel with scholarly needs for literature, the public, professionals, and policy-makers also need to access current COVID-19 research to inform their decision-making, such as whether to recommend wearing protective masks. It is therefore important to assess the COVID-19 coverage and growth of scholarly publication indexes, as well as the value of citation counts for new COVID-19 research. There are initiatives to help various communities with curated collections of COVID-19 documents, such as published biomedical documents from PubMed Central ( PMC, 2020), preprints from medRxiv and bioRxiv ( medRxiv, 2020), and a data mining collection ( Allen Institute, 2020 Colavizza, Costas, et al., 2020), but none are complete. The more inclusive online citation indexes of sites such as Google Scholar and Dimensions.ai seem like suitable alternatives because they index both the traditional scholarly literature and documents not published in journals, including preprints ( Herzog, Hook, & Konkiel, 2020 Kousha & Thelwall, 2019a). Traditional citation indexes may not be fast enough, especially given that they do not index most preprints, and citation counts may not help point to important studies. Although this is normal for science, standard literature search methods may be ineffective in a rapid publishing environment. As part of the response, researchers, professionals, and the public may need to consult the scientific literature for the latest findings. 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. For instance, PubMed added related publications daily between January 17 and Ap1 ( Figure 1), reaching over 300 in a single day. The international scientific effort to mitigate COVID-19 is unprecedented in scale and rapidity. 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. 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. 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. A few COVID-19 papers from the 21,395 in Dimensions were already highly cited, with substantial news and social media attention. Google Scholar’s results included many false matches. The rapidly increasing volume of research is particularly accessible through Dimensions, and less through Scopus, the Web of Science, and PubMed. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during Mato April 18, 2020. In this rapidly evolving context, scholars, professionals, and the public may need to identify important new studies quickly. The COVID-19 pandemic requires a fast response from researchers to help address biological, medical, and public health issues to minimize its impact. ![]()
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