Abstract

The scientific community is facing one of its greatest challenges in solving a global health problem: the Covid-19 pandemic. This situation has generated an unprecedented volume of publications. What is the volume of scientific publications on Covid-19? The general objective of this research work is to obtain a global vision of the daily growth of scientific production on Covid-19 in various databases (Dimensions, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, PubMed, and eight repositories). In relation to the results obtained, Dimensions indexes a total of 9,435 publications (69% with peer review and 2,677 preprints) well above Scopus (1,568) and WoS (718). This is a classic bibliometric phenomenon of exponential growth (R2 = 0.92). The daily global growth rate is 500 publications and the production doubles every 15 days. In the case of PubMed the weekly growth is around 1,000 publications. Of the eight repositories studied, PubMed Central, medRxiv and SSRN are the leaders, but despite their contribution, journals continue to be the core of scientific communication. Finally, it has been established that three of every four publications on the Covid-19 are available in open access. The information explosion which places us, information professionals, at the centre of the information pandemic demands a serious and coordinated response.

Abstract

This paper analyses the news on Covid-19 and 2019-nCov in the Spanish media. This is done by using news retrieved from My news database. The analysis includes the total amount of news in Spanish media by type of media; the evolution of the publication in digital media considering various periods of time, and the volume of news in the most used Spanish digital media. The results show that digital media are the most used among other types to publish on the topic, with a significant increase since the beginning of the alarm state. In this sense, some arguments on the function and utility of this type of media during the confinement are exposed. Also, the essential role of digital media covering the population’s information needs is discussed. The digital media with the largest number publications are abc.es, 20minutos.es, and elconfidencial.com. The value of this work is that it can serve as starting point for others in order to carry out content analysis on the subject considering different channels and digital media.