Article
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 Database: WHO Needs It?
Version 1
: Received: 3 July 2020 / Approved: 5 July 2020 / Online: 5 July 2020 (07:07:57 CEST)
Version 2 : Received: 1 August 2020 / Approved: 2 August 2020 / Online: 2 August 2020 (17:43:38 CEST)
Version 2 : Received: 1 August 2020 / Approved: 2 August 2020 / Online: 2 August 2020 (17:43:38 CEST)
How to cite: Kodvanj, I.; Homolak, J.; Virag, D.; Trkulja, V. World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 Database: WHO Needs It?. Preprints 2020, 2020070051. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0051.v1 Kodvanj, I.; Homolak, J.; Virag, D.; Trkulja, V. World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 Database: WHO Needs It?. Preprints 2020, 2020070051. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0051.v1
Abstract
A large number of COVID-19 publications has created a need to collect all research-related material in centralized databases. Generating and maintaining such databases regularly, while preserving the quality of the content is challenging, especially considering that the bibliometric databases rely on different data categorization strategies. In this short article, we investigate the functionality and quality of the WHO, PubMed and Scopus databases with a focus on missing values and duplicate entries related to COVID-19. Even though the WHO database is compiled from multiple sources, we conclude that using only the WHO database is not satisfactory as a lot of articles are still available exclusively in other databases. In addition to that, a more careful investigation revealed significant quality problems with all databases in terms of missing values, and many duplicate entries in the WHO database.
Supplementary and Associated Material
https://github.com/ikodvanj/bibliographicdb: data repository
Keywords
COVID-19; WHO; database; systematic review; data quality; data
Subject
Social Sciences, Library and Information Sciences
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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