Daily growth rate of scientific production on Covid-19. Analysis in databases and open access repositories (2004.06721v1)

Abstract: The scientific community is facing one of its greatest challenges in solving a global health problem: COVID-19 pandemic. This situation has generated an unprecedented volume of publications. What is the volume, in terms of publications, of research on COVID-19? The general objective of this research work is to obtain a global vision of the daily growth of scientific production on COVID-19 in different databases (Dimensions, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus-Elsevier, Pubmed and eight repositories). In relation to the results obtained, Dimensions indexes a total of 9435 publications (69% with peer review and 2677 preprints) well above Scopus (1568) and WoS (718). This is a classic biliometric phenomenon of exponential growth (R2 = 0.92). The global growth rate is 500 publications and the production doubles every 15 days. In the case of Pubmed the weekly growth is around 1000 publications. Of the eight repositories analysed, Pubmed Central, Medrxiv and SSRN are the leaders. Despite their enormous contribution, the journals continue to be the core of scientific communication. Finally, it has been established that three out of every four publications on the COVID-19 are available in open access. The information explosion demands a serious and coordinated response from information professionals, which places us at the centre of the information pandemic.