MeSH descriptors indicate the knowledge growth in the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic
This provides a method for monitoring the evolution of scientific understanding during a pandemic, though it is incremental as it applies existing indexing techniques to new data.
The study analyzed SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 papers from 2020 in PUBMED to track knowledge growth by examining the first occurrences of MeSH descriptors, revealing that about 20% of records contained these keywords.
The scientific papers dealing with the novel betacoronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by this virus, published in 2020 and recorded in the database PUBMED, were retrieved on April 27, 2020. About 20\% of the records contain Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), keywords assigned to records in the course of the indexing process in order to summarise the articles' contents. The temporal sequence of the first occurrences of the keywords was determined, thus giving insight into the growth of the knowledge base of the pandemic.