COVID-19 publications: Database coverage, citations, readers, tweets, news, Facebook walls, Reddit posts
Kayvan Kousha, Mike Thelwall

TL;DR
This study analyzes the rapid growth and impact of COVID-19 research publications across various databases and social media platforms during early 2020, highlighting the correlation between social media attention and citation impact.
Contribution
It provides a comparative assessment of database coverage and social media influence on COVID-19 research impact during the initial pandemic phase.
Findings
Google Scholar and Dimensions offer the broadest coverage.
Highly tweeted articles tend to be highly read and cited later.
Social media attention correlates with citation impact in the short term.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic requires a fast response from researchers to help address biological, medical and public health issues to minimize its impact. In this rapidly evolving context, scholars, professionals and the public may need to quickly identify important new studies. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during 21 March to 18 April 2020. The results confirm a rapid increase in the volume of research, which particularly accessible through Google Scholar and Dimensions, and less through Scopus, the Web of Science, PubMed. A few COVID-19 papers from the 21,395 in Dimensions were already highly cited, with substantial news and social media attention. 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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCOVID-19 Clinical Research Studies
