Welcome to the initial preview of the covid19-research.network, an interactive platform that parses and visualizes the latest COVID-19-related scientific findings in an easily accessible interface.

It provides the latest peer-reviewed articles from PubMed as well as preprints from medRxiv, bioRxiv and arXiv.

What do I see when I look at this network?

Every node is an article. Links between articles are drawn based on the semantic similarity of their abstracts. The relative positions of nodes in the network are given by a force-directed layout, which groups articles into clusters that correspond to the sub-topics in the COVID-19 literature. The nodes are colored according to categories found and hand-labelled using a LDA-based topic model.

How do I start?

Press the network button on the upper left to enter the network mode.

You will see a network representation of the latest 1500 articles
(1000 peer-reviewed publications and 500 preprints).

Click on a node and highlight it as well as all other articles that are similar to it.

Enter the text mode on the upper left to see a classical list view of the selected articles.

Apply the filters in the command palette on the left to find relevant articles for you.

Time series

Data acquisition

The latest COVID-19 related research articles are collected daily from PubMed (peer-reviewed articles and letters), bioRxiv, medRxiv and arXiv (preprints).

Categorization

After preprocessing, a LDA topic model is trained on the whole corpus. The resulting topics are labelled by hand.

Network creation

Every node in the network is an article. They are linked based on the cosine similarity of the tf-idf vectors of their abstracts.

Graph layout and partitioning

We visualize the resulting graph using a force-directed algorithm, where the relative positions of the nodes depend on their adjacency (nodes that are strongly connected are close to each other). In this context, dense groups of nodes are expected to correspond to underlying sub-categories in the literature.

covid19-research.network

• Armin Pournaki (Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig)
  
• Alexander Dejaco (Department of Anaesthesia, University Hospital of Regensburg)
  
• Sven Banisch (Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig)
  
• Eckehard Olbrich (Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig)
  
• Hermann Brugger (Institute of Mountain Emergency Medicine, EURAC Research, Bolzano)
  

I found a bug!

Note that the initial release works best on Firefox and Chrome on desktop devices.

Please report any bugs to pournaki[at]mis.mpg.de and don't hesitate to get in touch for suggestions and improvements.