Publishing during a pandemic: comparison of scientific knowledge between COVID-19 and Swine Flu

Abstract

Scientific knowledge has a well-established cycle of generating hypotheses, testing them in experiments with proper discussion, and submitting it to the scientific community analysis through publications. It takes time to establish sample size for biomedical studies, especially concerning the effect of medicines and vaccines. The World Health Organization’s protocol estimates that more than 19 months of experiments are necessary to approve a vaccine, for example. As the world has witnessed, a pandemic with immediate impact on human lives urges scientific methods to speed up finding solutions. Here it was assessed the speed and volume of information generated by the Academia to tackle the COVID-19 compared to the Swine Flu pandemic. Were considered papers published in journals indexed in PubMed, the most comprehensive biomedical scientific database available online. The number of publications about COVID-19 was 11 times higher than the number of publications about Swine Flu in a one-year timeframe. Though the expectation were finding more international collaborations and studies focusing on vaccines for COVID-19, papers were mostly concentrated in China and studying symptoms, managing the pandemic, reviewing knowledge, or establishing clinical trials. For sure, science is working faster every day for solutions in biomedical critical situations. However, the fast volume of information might blurry decisions on public health management. This paper’s results show it is mandatory before using papers to take actions, waiting for the scientific community to first progress on its scientific knowledge cycle and mature discussions on the generated knowledge.