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Sources and methodology

The COVID-19 Open Research Gateway is an entry point to scientific products (publications-data-software-protocols-etc.) related to the epidemic (disease, virus) and all future research around it (e.g., social). It aggregates bibliographic data for research data and publications coming from relevant and authoritative sources worldwide, research products related to COVID-19 and uploaded to Zenodo with suitable licenses, and research outputs available in the OpenAIRE Research Graph.

More information about the processes and workflows we apply to construct theOpenAIRE Research Graphcan be found in the OpenAIRE portal.

Research products available in the OpenAIRE Research Graphare included in the gateway according to the following criteria:

  1. They are included in one or more trusted sources for COVID-19. Check our public up-to-date list of data sources. If you want to suggest scientific material with bibliographic information, please use this form. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the following scholarly communication sources and initiatives:

  2. Their metadata is collected from one of the sources listed here (which were selected by the gateway managers as they likely include content related to COVID-19) and their titles include one of the following terms “COVID-19”, “SARS-CoV-2”, or “2019-nCoV”. Terms match both in lower or upper case;
  3. Their subjects include the MeSH term “COVID-19” (code C000657245) or the other relevant keyword terms displayed on the homepage of the Gateway (e.g. “SARS-CoV-2”, “2019-nCoV”, “Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”).
  4. An authenticated user linked a scientific product and the “COVID-19” community by using the Link functionality of the gateway or the OpenAIRE BETA EXPLORE Portal. In doubt on how the linking functionality works? Check for more details here.
  5. They are research products relevant to the topic according to OpenAIRE mining algorithms, based on:
    • The content of their full-texts. If titles and abstracts of scientific publications comply to the following rule:
      year > 2018 AND (“COVID-19” OR “SARS-CoV-2” OR “2019-nCoV” OR “HCoV-19”) OR [(“Coronavirus” OR “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”) AND “Wuhan”]
      Terms match in lower or upper case, with or without dashes. Note that publications published before 2019 are discarded. Also, the algorithm searches on the title of a publication first and, if nothing is found, then it searches on the abstract.
    • Links they have to other products identified as relevant to COVID-19. For example, if a “COVID-19 research article” is linked to a dataset, then the dataset is also included in the gateway.
    • Links they have to funding projects. If a research product has a link to one of the projects selected by the gateway curators as relevant for the topic, then the research product is included in the gateway.

Trust and quality is an issue for us all and we would like to invite experts to collaborate and work in our team to help us in identifying the right sources, curate the COVID-19 Graph and moderate user interactions. Fill this form if you are interested and want to contribute.