There are 42 000 journal articles on the pandemic

“In five months, a volume of work has been generated that even the most intensive of emergent fields, such as deep learning or nanotechnology, have taken years to create,” Simon Porter and Daniel Hook suggest in a new paper for Digital Science (owner of Altmetric).

By June there were 42 000 journal articles on the disease and 420 datasets, plus patents, policies and research grants.

“To give some context,” they write, deep learning in AI took seven plus years to progress from a few hundred papers annually to 11 000 plus. “In the case of COVID-19, the same volume has been reached in just four and a half months.”

They analyse the extraordinary growth in research on the disease, and what it may mean for research systems here.