COVID-19 Case Series: Publishing Trends in High-Incidence Countries

Written by GIDEON co-founder, Dr. Steve Berger Medical publishing has been significantly influenced by this year’s events. An unfortunate side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an explosion of professional publications dealing with every possible aspect of the disease. Innumerable studies dissect the clinical features, epidemiology, imaging characteristics, and risk factors of a series of patients treated in hospitals or clinics. The GIDEON database collates all case series dealing with COVID-19 that have been cited in PubMed. These numbers do not include drug trials and disease prevalence surveys. 1,316 relevant series have been cited by PubMed as of August 13, published from 55 (28.2%) countries and dependencies which report the disease. Seven hundred and eleven series were published from China, encompassing 185,280 individual patients. The total number of COVID-19 cases reported by China to that date was 84,756. In other words, 2.19 Chinese patients appear in case series – for every 1 patient that is actually reported! China alone accounts for 54.0% of all published case series, despite the fact that only 0.041% of the World’s cases were reported by that country. In part, these numbers might reflect the fact that “publishable data” were already accumulating in China before significant numbers were reported elsewhere, or delays that might be inherent in the publishing cycle itself. Other factors could include the relative numbers of clinical staff a...
Source: GIDEON blog - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Epidemiology News Source Type: blogs