COVID-19 Variants: Staying Updated as New Research Emerges

by Emily Haag

Hundreds of thousands of open source COVID-19 publications, preprints, clinical trials, protocols, and other resources have been published in the past year. With a high volume of new journal articles and preprints emerging every day, trying to keep up with new research is overwhelming. Moreover, it is a tremendous undertaking to simply reduce new publications to a specific research field, as the number of papers is growing rapidly across epidemiology, virology, sociology, pharmacology, science policy, biochemistry – the list goes on.

An overwhelming amount of publicly available research presents a problem for researchers attempting to access preprints and data regarding new variants of COVID-19. At such a crucial time in the evolution of the pandemic, how do researchers stay up-to-date with the high volume of information that is uncovered daily about B.1.1.7 or N501Y or P681H, etc.?

More than ever, it is essential that researchers have access to a searchable, centralized hub of all academic resources related to COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. Luckily, oubreak.info offers that solution.

Outbreak.info exists to help epidemiologists, biologists, geneticists, and anyone investigating new COVID-19 mutations answer important research questions. For example:

Outbreak.info’s numerous user-friendly features provide multiple ways to narrow down the thousands of academic resources. The interface aggregates publications from LitCovid, PubMed, bioRixv, medRxiv, MRC Centre for Global Infection Disease Analysis, and COVID-19 Literature Surveillance Team in one place, standardizing metadata and applying NLP to make these sources searchable and more accessible. Read more about our data sources.

Multiple filters can be applied to search terms. Filters can be narrowed down using the predictive search feature. Results can also be sorted by best match, date, or name.

Search results can be filtered by:

As the world turns it focus to the new COVID-19 variants and researchers are once again placed under tremendous pressure to pivot, adapt, and stay ahead of the high volume of developing information about these viral mutations, outbreak.info can ease some of the strain caused by the infodemic.

What has been discovered this week about the B.1.1.7 variant?

Since the detection of SARS-CoV-2 lineage B.1.1.7 in the United Kingdom, a growing number of preprints have been released daily that aim to help researchers solve more of the puzzle. In the past week, a few notable contributions include:

Explore other ways outbreak.info can assist researchers.

Or learn more about the resources collected by outbreak.info.