Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has caused global distress by giving rise to the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting various professions, including dentistry.[1] Dental researchers/clinicians need immediate access to the most recent studies on various aspects of the disease to conduct further studies and become aware of its effects on maxillofacial tissues and dental treatments.
Timely availability of the latest findings obtained worldwide is a major consideration for researchers, and thus knowledge on how to acquire such data would be essential for investigating the COVID-19 crisis. Manuscripts containing novel information cannot become immediately available and need to be peer-reviewed so that their information is validated. For this reason, published preprints may not be unconditionally used, even when the data are relevant and essential for a study. To help with this issue, artificial intelligence along with a network of scholars is being used (e.g., Rapid Reviews COVID-19) to separate the most effective preprints, which would be ultimately reviewed by referees within a few days leading to accelerated data availability.[2]
Scientists/scholars can gain access to the most relevant information, in the shortest amount of time without having to comb through a large volume of nonessential material, by using resources that are specific to COVID-19 and who freely offer data on ongoing issues of the disease. These include:
LitCovid (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/) is a daily-updated hub that detects 35% more pertinent papers than searches predicated on keywords. It classifies PubMed articles by research-topic and geographic-location displayed on a world map. Papers are systematized by disease overview, mechanism, transmission, treatment, case-report, and epidemic-forecasting[3]
CORD19 or COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (https://www.semanticscholar.org/cord19) is a downloadable, weekly-updated resource of full-text and metadata, optimized for machine readability and available for data-mining[4]
CURE or Covid-19 Universal REsource gateway https://drtc.isibang.ac.in/okp/CURE/supplies open-access resources, open-data and open-educational-websites on COVID-19, for researchers and the general public. It links data from publications, repositories, and datasets while providing access to databases with statistics on the most recent state of the virus
IADR https://www.iadr.org/COVID-19 has made available COVID-19-resources while providing information on funding opportunities and links to coronavirus-relevant-research/webinars
Cochrane Oral Health (https://rb.gy/oqwnyu) supplies resources on COVID-19 and links to dentistry-related associations of different countries.
The time-span between submission--publication can be an obstacle. Many reviewers decline invitations by reason of being “busy due to COVID-19-related responsibilities.” In addition, processing a large number of COVID-19 submissions can be difficult for the Editorial-team. Well-respected publishers have taken measures to facilitate publication by supplying free fast-tracking, extending limits on author revisions, encouraging posting preprints to bioRxiv or medRxiv[5] and offering publication waivers. To further help with accessibility, publishers have presented COVID-19 articles altogether as a single collection. Examples of such collections in dentistry are https://rb.gy/dlrueq and https://www.nature.com/collections/jhcagbcgje.
We hope that by using all available resources, the scientific community can resolve the COVID-19 global crisis in the shortest time possible.
Financial support and sponsorship
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Conflicts of interest
The authors of this manuscript declare that they have no conflicts of interest, real or perceived, financial or non-financial in this article.
REFERENCES
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