Building a Systematic Online Living Evidence Summary of COVID-19 Research

Throughout the global coronavirus pandemic, we have seen an unprecedented volume of COVID-19 researchpublications. This vast body of evidence continues to grow, making it difficult for research users to keep up with the pace of evolving research findings. To enable the synthesis of this evidence for timely use by researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders, we developed an automated workflow to collect, categorise, and visualise the evidence from primary COVID-19 research studies. We trained a crowd of volunteer reviewers to annotate studies by relevance to COVID-19, study objectives, and methodological approaches. Using these human decisions, we are training machine learning classifiers and applying text-mining tools to continually categorise the findings and evaluate the quality of COVID-19 evidence.

Crowdsourcing and COVID-19: a case study of Cochrane Crowd

Cochrane has used crowdsourcing effectively to identify health evidence since 2014. To date, over 175,000 trialshave been identified for Cochrane’s Central Register of Controlled Trials via Cochrane Crowd (https://crowd.cochrane.org), Cochrane’s citizen science platform, engaging a Crowd of over 20,000 people from 166 countries. The COVID-19 pandemic presented the evidence synthesis community with the enormous challenge of keeping up with the exponential output of COVID-19 research. This case study will detail the new tasks we developed to aid the production of COVID-19 rapid reviews and supply the Cochrane COVID-19 study register. The pandemic initially looked set to disrupt the Crowd team’s plans for 2020 but has in fact served to further our understanding of the potential role crowdsourcing can play in the health evidence ecosystem.

Using automation to produce a ‘living map’ of the COVID-19 research literature

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life worldwide and presented unique challenges in the health evidencesynthesis space. The urgent nature of the pandemic required extreme rapidity for keeping track of research, andthis presented a unique opportunity for long-proposed automation systems to be deployed and evaluated. Wecompared the use of novel automation technologies with conventional manual screening; and Microsoft AcademicGraph (MAG) with the MEDLINE and Embase databases locating the emerging research evidence. We foundthat a new workflow involving machine learning to identify relevant research in MAG achieved a much higherrecall with lower manual effort than using conventional approaches.

A rapid response to the COVID-19 outbreak

Early in the pandemic, as scientific reports and preliminary research on both clinical and public health aspectsof COVID-19 were rapidly generated, we recognised the need for a dynamic, interactive tool that could captureand collate emerging evidence sources to inform research and decision-making efforts. In particular, we observed that numerous similar research efforts across the globe were happening in parallel - prompting an urgent need to connect research teams with each other and maximize research efficiency. Our colleagues in China provided daily translations of emerging evidence to aid networking between research groups working across the world. Here we describe how the meta-evidence project met daily and ongoing challenges and what was learned as a result. We describe the benefit of finding ways to instead work with better resourced teams and promote collective and open efforts to synthesise the evidence, which in the end, outweighed the considerable costs.

TREC-COVID: Building a Pandemic Retrieval Test Collection

Assessing how good is a search engine has been an active area of development for more than three decades. During the COVID-19 pandemic however the rate of change in what people are interested in, and the availableinformation online has introduced further challenges for search. TREC-COVID introduces a benchmark collectionto evaluate search engines and provide the means to improve them under the special circumstances of a pandemic.

Open Science and information literacy

The APPsyCI, a Portuguese research center, decided to incorporate, in all its areas of activity, a research line within Open Science articulated with information literacy (IL). The Open Science assumptions were implemented through several actions: repository management, teacher and researcher training, support for choosing the journals where to publish, dissemination, and promotion of scientific knowledge within FAIR principles. The social and academic impact of the research line provides some light on the national landscape for research innovation and broadens horizons and sheds when combining IL with Open Science. Thus, the creation of this research line within the research center shows that the association of Open Science with IL can be considered as the path and object of applied research.

Collaborating to plan efficient public health guideline evidence reviews

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) produces public health guidelines. Information specialists collaborate with technical analysts to perform systematic searches for evidence reviews (ERs). Public health ERs require searches from multiple disciplines across a range of sources leading to high volumes of results. The purpose of the project was to provide evidence to support the choice of sources for new topics. It aimed to retrospectively analyse a sample of NICE public health ERs by examining which sources retrieved publications. Medical databases found the highest proportion of publications, but smaller subject focussed databases and search techniques also contributed. These findings justify use of a range of sources for public health reviews and help the planning of ERs.

The role of Spanish health libraries in scientific publication

Health libraries have been established as publication support services. Despite its importance, there is currently no study about the services that these centers offer. The aim of this work is to understand the role that libraries play in institutional scientific publishing policies. The sample was taken from the National Catalogue of Hospitals, the list of libraries of the Catalogue of Periodicals in Spanish Health Sciences Libraries (c17) and the National Catalogue of Health Sciences Publications (CNCS). Subsequently, virtual health libraries have also been incorporated. From this list, a questionnaire about library staff and activities related to publication process was sent. We obtained a participation rate of 61.21%. The average number of technical personnel was 1.15 in virtual libraries and 0.81 in hospital libraries. The activities carried out have been: training activities (82.2%), counselling (90.1%), dissemination (30.7%) and evaluation (50.5%). The staff in libraries are insufficient. In many cases technicians assume an overwork of serving in both (virtual and hospital libraries). Most libraries offer training and research support services although there are differences between virtual and hospital ones. There is a relationship between the number of technicians and the publication support services.

Discussing the future of open peer-review: a survey of journals in the JCR Public, Environmental and Occupational Health category

The journals listed in the JCR Public, Environmental and Occupational Health category are examined by the authors in order to check how many of them practice some kind of Open Peer-Review (OPR). An overview of the different OPR methods identified is given: a variety of practices considered as OPR even though the number of journals using them is very small. Furthermore, the possible future evolution of OPR is examined.