Characteristics of scientific articles on COVID-19 published during the initial 3 months of the pandemic

  1. Nicola Di Girolamo
  2. Reint Meursinge Reynders

Reviewed by

Read the full article

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

No abstract available

Article activity feed

  1. Version published to 10.1007/s11192-020-03632-0
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.20.20073130: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    RandomizationThis implies that a broad spectrum of articles ranging from letters to the editors to randomized controlled trials were eligible for inclusion.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    An abstract was defined as any type of information reported in the area for abstracts in PubMed.
    PubMed
    suggested: (PubMed, RRID:SCR_004846)
    We performed a search on Medline through PubMed with the string “H1N1”.
    Medline
    suggested: (MEDLINE, RRID:SCR_002185)
    Data analyses and figures were performed using SPSS (version 24, IBM) and R 3.6.3 (R Core Team, 2020, www.R-project.org/).
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Fifth, only 3.6% (42/1165) of all included articles reported limitations in their abstracts. Reporting limitations is an important warning sign for end-users of research articles and is an obligatory item in the reporting of abstracts of systematic reviews.8 Comparison with other studies: The exponential growth of publications as was identified in this paper during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic was also identified in past viral outbreaks such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, and Swine Flu.1 This high publication rate dropped dramatically upon containment of these diseases. Gori et al.9 identified a high proportion of secondary literature in the first 30 days of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, their findings cannot be directly compared with ours because they used different methods, had a much smaller sample size (234 papers versus 1165 in our sample), measured mostly different outcomes and at different time points (one month versus 3 months in our sample). Strengths and weaknesses: The strengths of this meta-epidemiological study are: (1) this is the first research study that assessed the characteristics of articles on COVID-19 listed in PubMed in the first three months since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic (2) all study selection and data extraction procedures were conducted by two methodologists independently and all raw data were reported in additional files (3) the manuscript was reported according to the STROBE checklist. Having searched eligible articles ...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.20.20073130v1 on medRxiv