At the beginning of 2020, human activities were interrupted by a new
virus, identified as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19 disease. The scientific
area was no exception: for a certain period, researchers around the world were
forced to leave their laboratoriesand work remotely.
There was a global necessity for finding alternatives focused on generating
knowledge and publishing data, so repositories of scientific information, such
as databases, represented strong support. In the specific case of life
sciences, different strategies allowed rapid compilation of data and its
sharing worldwide. Therefore, in this work, the impact of the SARS-CoV-2
pandemic on the amount of peer-reviewed and published papers during COVID-19 times was analyzed along
with the role of databases. Our results pointed out that an increase in the
number of papers belonging to different knowledge fields took place, with the
medical field being the most significant. On the other hand, the complete
genome of the new virus was sequenced, and repositories were created with
sufficient data for monitoring, preventing, and controlling itsdissemination. This was the case for the generation
of vaccines in addition to potential candidates for drugs against COVID-19.
However, although in 2021, vaccines allowed us to gradually return to our activities, databases and the
generation of other repositories remain a key point for facing new strains and adapting
References
[1]
WHO (World Health Organization) (2021) Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19). https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus#tab=tab_1
[2]
WHO (World Health Organization) (2021) Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard. https://covid19.who.int
[3]
WBDG (Whole Building Design Guide—National Institute of Building Sciences) (2019) Laboratory: Dry. https://www.wbdg.org/space-types/laboratory-dry
[4]
Korbel, J.O. and Stegle, O. (2020) Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Life Scientists. Genome Biology, 21, 113. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-020-02031-1
[5]
Tsatsou, P. (2016) Digital Technologies in the Research Process: Lessons from the Digital Research Community in the UK. Computers in Human Behavior, 61, 597-608. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.03.053
[6]
Gauthier, J., Vincent, A.T., Charette, S.J. and Derome, N. (2019) A Brief History of Bioinformatics. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 20, 1981-1996. https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bby063
[7]
Bhatt, V.D., Patel, M. and Joshi, C.G. (2018) An Insight of Biological Databases Used in Bioinformatics. In: Wadhwa, G., Shanmughavel, P., Singh, A. and Bellare, J., Eds., Current Trends in Bioinformatics: An Insight, Springer, Singapore, 3-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7483-7_1
[8]
Zou, D., Ma, L., Yu, J. and Zhang, Z. (2015) Biological Databases for Human Research. Genomics Proteomics Bioinformatics, 13, 55-63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gpb.2015.01.006
[9]
Rigden, D.J. and Fernández, X.M. (2020) The 27th Annual Nucleic Acids Research Database Issue and Molecular Biology Database Collection. Nucleic Acids Research, 48, D1-D8. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkz1161
[10]
Rigden, D.J. and Fernández, X.M. (2022) The 2022 Nucleic Acids Research Database Issue and the Online Molecular Biology Database Collection. Nucleic Acids Research, 50, D1-D10. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkab1195
[11]
Eisen, M.B., Akhmanova, A., Behrens, T.E. and Weigel, D. (2020) Publishing in the Time of COVID-19. Elife, 9, e57162. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.57162
[12]
Chirico, F., Teixeira da Silva, J.A. and Magnavita, N. (2020) Questionable Peer Review in the Publishing Pandemic during the Time of COVID-19: Implications for Policy Makers and Stakeholders. Croatian Medical Journal, 61, 300-301. https://doi.org/10.3325/cmj.2020.61.300
[13]
R Core Team (2020) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. https://www.r-project.org
[14]
Chen, Q., Allot, A. and Lu, Z. (2021) LitCovid: An Open Database of COVID-19 Literature. Nucleic Acids Research, 49, D1534-D1540. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaa952
[15]
Else, H. (2020) How a Torrent of COVID Science Changed Research Publishing—In Seven Charts. Nature, 588, 553. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03564-y
[16]
TLG Health. (2020) Publishing in the Time of COVID-19. The Lancet Global Health, 8, e860. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30260-6
[17]
Wu, F., Zhao, S., Yu, B., Chen, Y.M., Wang, W., Song, Z.G., Hu, Y., Tao, Z.W., Tian, J.H., Pei, Y.Y., Yuan, M.L., Zhang, Y.L., Dai, F.H., Liu, Y., Wang, Q.M., Zheng, J.J., Xu, L., Holmes, E.C. and Zhang, Y.Z. (2020) A New Coronavirus Associated with Human Respiratory Disease in China. Nature, 579, 265-269. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2008-3
[18]
Giovanetti, M., Benedetti, F., Campisi, G., Ciccozzi, A., Fabris, S., Ceccarelli, G., Tambone, V., Caruso, A., Angeletti, S., Zella, D. and Ciccozzi, M. (2021) Evolution Patterns of SARS-CoV-2: Snapshot on Its Genome Variants. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 538, 88-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbrc.2020.10.102
[19]
Dai, Y., Chen, H., Zhuang, S., Feng, X., Fang, Y., Tang, H., Dai, R., Tang, L., Liu, J., Ma, T. and Zhong, G. (2020) Immunodominant Regions Prediction of Nucleocapsid Protein for SARS-CoV-2 Early Diagnosis: A Bioinformatics and Immunoinformatics Study. Pathogens and Global Health, 114, 463-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/20477724.2020.1838190
[20]
Ritchie, H., Mathieu, E., Rodés-Guirao, L., Appel, C., Giattino, C., Ortiz-Ospina, E., Hasell, J., Macdonald, B., Dattani, S. and Roser, M. (2020) Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19). https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
[21]
Cyranoski, D. (2021) Alarming COVID Variants Show Vital Role of Genomic Surveillance. Nature, 589, 337-338. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00065-4
[22]
COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) (2020) An Integrated National Scale SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Surveillance Network. The Lancet Microbe, 1, e99-e100. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2666-5247(20)30054-9
[23]
Duong, D. (2021) What’s Important to Know about the New COVID-19 Variants? Canadian Medical Association Journal, 193, E141-E142. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.1095915
[24]
Jogalekar, M.P., Veerabathini, A. and Gangadaran, P. (2021) SARS-CoV-2 Variants: A Double-Edged Sword? Experimental Biology and Medicine (Maywood), 246, 1721-1726. https://doi.org/10.1177/15353702211014146
[25]
Otto, S.P., Day, T., Arino, J., Colijn, C., Dushoff, J., Li, M., Mechai, S., Van Domselaar, G., Wu, J., Earn, D.J.D. and Ogden, N.H. (2021) The Origins and Potential Future of SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern in the Evolving COVID-19 Pandemic. Current Biology, 31, R918-R929. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.06.049
[26]
Carroll, T., Fox, D., van Doremalen, N., Ball, E., Morris, M.K. Sotomayor-Gonzalez, A., Servellita, V., Rustagi, A., Yinda, C.K., Fritts, L., Port, J.R., Ma, Z.M., Holbrook, M., Schulz, J., Blish, C.A., Hanson, C., Chiu, C.Y., Munster, V., Stanley, S. and Miller, C.J. (2021) The B.1.427/1.429 (Epsilon) SARS-CoV-2 Variants Are More Virulent than Ancestral B.1 (614G) in Syrian Hamsters. PLOS Pathogens, 18, e1009914. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1009914
[27]
Araf, Y., Akter, F., Tang, Y., Fatemi, R., Alam, S., Zheng, C. and Hossain, G. (2022) Omicron Variant of SARS-CoV-2: Genomics, Transmissibility, and Responses to Current COVID-19 Vaccines. Journal of Medical Virology, 94, 1825-1832. https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.27588
[28]
Fontanet, A., Autran, B., Lina, B., Kieny, M.P., Karim, S.S.A. and Sridhar, D. (2021) SARS-CoV-2 Variants and Ending the COVID-19 Pandemic. The Lancet, 397, 952-954. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00370-6
[29]
Callaway, E. and Ledford, H. (2021) How to Redesign COVID Vaccines So They Protect against Variants. Nature, 590, 15-16. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00241-6
[30]
Zhou, W. and Wang, W. (2021) Fast-Spreading SARS-CoV-2 Variants: Challenges to and New Design Strategies of COVID-19 Vaccines. Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, 6, 226. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41392-021-00644-x
[31]
ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) (2015) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/Framework_ILHE.pdf
[32]
UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) (2022) Information Literacy. https://www.unesco.org/en/communication-information/media-information-literacy
[33]
Song, P. and Karako, T. (2020) COVID-19: Real-Time Dissemination of Scientific Information to Fight a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. BioScience Trends, 14, 1-2. https://doi.org/10.5582/bst.2020.01056
[34]
WHO (World Health Organization) (2020) Managing the COVID-19 Infodemic: Promoting Healthy Behaviours and Mitigating the Harm from Misinformation and Disinformation. https://www.who.int/news/item/23-09-2020-managing-the-covid-19-infodemic-promoting-healthy-behaviours-and-mitigating-the-harm-from-misinformation-and-disinformation
[35]
Marin, L. (2020) Three Contextual Dimensions of Information on Social Media: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Infodemic. Ethics and Information Technology, 23, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-020-09550-2
[36]
Tornberg, H.N., Moezinia, C., Wei, C., Bernstein, S.A., Wei, C., Al-Beyati, R., Quan, T. and Diemert, D.J. (2021) Assessing the Dissemination of COVID-19 Articles across Social Media with Altmetric and PlumX Metrics: Correlational Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23, e21408. https://doi.org/10.2196/21408
[37]
Popouet, S.Y. (2021) COVID-19: Impact and Opportunities in Gabon. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 9, 167-185. https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2021.98012
[38]
Sepúlveda-Vildósola, A.C., Mejía-Aranguré, J.M., Barrera-Cruz, C., Fuentes-Morales, N.A. and Rodriguez-Zeron, C. (2020) Scientific Publications during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Archives of Medical Research, 51, 349-354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arcmed.2020.05.019
