back to article Come back, AI. All is forgiven: We know we've mocked you in the past, but we need help analyzing 26,000 papers on COVID-19, coronaviruses

A dataset of more than 29,000 scientific papers focused on COVID-19, and the coronavirus family as a whole, has been publicly shared to ultimately help the medical world thwart the bio-nasties. Specifically, it is hoped AI-based tools can be developed to comb through this COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) and dig up …

  1. Mike 137 Silver badge

    Breakdown?

    It would be really interesting to know what proportion of the papers refer specifically to COVID-19 as opposed to generic or other corona viruses.

  2. Version 1.0 Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Science papers are normally published in journals and unless you have purchased a subscription to the journal all you see is a short summery and a request to subscribe. The actual details of the research are not available to the public unless you purchase them or spend a while on Google searching for other referances that may have leaked released a PDF copy for students course studies.

    I guess potentially the move to on-line courses, caused by COVID-19, could help general research.

    1. TVU Silver badge

      You will find for the most part that corresponding authors listed on published scientific reports will freely supply papers on polite request plus papers of interest can often be found on places like ResearchGate.

    2. Dal66

      True, but data scientists and data science institutions are more readily will to share knowledge. Also by the very nature of data science, it can be shared with ease. And also in data science, which is what we are talking about here, my understanding is that although the finding do probably end up in scientific journals, but majority of work is sent between scientific institutions, companies and macine learning institutions, as this is the very core of how AI and machine learning works.

    3. CountCadaver Silver badge

      If you know any university students (no matter the faculty) ask them to grab it for you, I know my Alma mater has a subscription to virtually everything and my wife grabbed all manner of papers to read, many of which were wholly unrelated to her Master's subject but fascinating nonetheless

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    29,000 scientific papers

    surely, at least ONE of those papers would contain the answer to the $64,000 Question i.e. "click this link to download the cure for the virus"...

  4. Il'Geller

    I can post whatever I want?

  5. ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo Silver badge

    How can 29.000 scientific paper have been published on the COVID-19 virus? The outbreak was around end of 2019, which is a pretty short time span for 29.000 papers to be published. Am I missing something?

    1. Peter2 Silver badge

      Yes. There are 195 countries in the world, and 26000 papers. That's 133 per country, which is probably if anything quite low given that this is the sort of thing that everybody who thinks that they can do anything to help is going to be working on it.

      And yes, I suspect that countries with lots of R&D (ie, the UK) are probably doing a lot articles than countries like Morocco, but the point stands.

    2. Version 1.0 Silver badge
      Big Brother

      When a new virus pops its little head up you will find a lot of people studying it - there was a lot of off-line discussions about CORVID-19 prior to it getting posted on Facebook, the majority of discussions saw it as a serious infection but not a big concern, there was research starting into vaccines too. Once it appeared on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram everyone on social media realized that this could be the end of the world and that everyone would die and it would be the politicians fault.

      So I wonder who started those posts?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    See also https://foldingathome.org/

    Like SETI, but looking for molecules instead of space aliens.

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