COVID-19 – New tools aim to tame pandemic paper tsunami, Jeffrey Brainard, Science  29 May 2020: Vol. 368, Issue 6494, pp. 924-925. DOI: 10.1126/science.368.6494.924. “Timothy Sheahan, a virologist studying COVID-19, wishes he could keep pace with the growing torrent of new scientific papers related to the pandemic. But there have just been too many—more than 5000 papers a week. “I’m not keeping up,” says Sheahan, who works at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It’s impossible.” A loose-knit army of data scientists and software developers is pressing hard to change that. They are creating digital collections of papers and building search tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that could help researchers quickly find the information they seek. The urgency is growing: The COVID-19 literature has grown to more than 31,000 papers since January and by one estimate is on pace to hit more than 52,000 by mid-June—among the biggest explosions of scientific literature ever. The volume of information “is like what you would get in a medical conference that used to happen yearly. Now, that’s happening daily,” says Sherry Chou, a neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who is studying COVID-19’s neurologic effects…”