The currency and completeness of specialized databases of COVID-19 publications

Several specialized collections of COVID-19 literature have been developed during the global health emergency. These include the WHO COVID-19 Global Literature Database, Cochrane COVID-19 Study Register, CAMARADES COVID-19 SOLES, Epistemonikos’ COVID-19 L-OVE, and LitCovid. Our objective was to evaluate the completeness of these collections and to measure the time from when COVID-19 articles are posted to when they appear in the collections. We tested each selected collection for the presence of 440 included studies from 25 COVID-19 systematic reviews. We sampled 112 journals and prospectively monitored their websites until a new COVID-19 article appeared. We then monitored for 2 weeks to see when the new articles appeared in each collection. PubMed served as a comparator. Every collection provided at least one record not found in PubMed. Four records (1%) were not in any of the sources studied. Collections contained between 83% and 93% of the primary studies with the WHO database being the most complete. By 2 weeks, between 60% and 78% of tracked articles had appeared. Our findings support the use of the best performing COVID-19 collections by systematic reviews to replace paywalled databases. •Multiple COVID-19 collections were evaluated for both their completeness and currency of COVID-19 literature, using PubMed as a comparator.•The majority of early COVID-19 systematic reviews rely on traditional literature databases suggesting a lack of awareness or comfort with COVID-19 collections.•Per our analysis, most of the COVID-19 collections are comparable to PubMed in both completeness and currency.•This study suggests that COVID-19 collections could replace or at least supplement traditional paywalled databases in systematic reviews.