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Methodologies for COVID-19 research and data analysis

This collection has closed and is no longer accepting new submissions. 

New Content Item © © denisismagilovIn March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, caused by the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus. Following the call from the WHO to immediately assess available data to learn what care approaches are most effective and evaluate the effects of therapies, this collection aims to report on original peer-reviewed research articles in methodological approaches to medical research related to COVID-19.

This BMC Medical Research Methodology collection of articles has not been sponsored and articles undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process overseen by our Guest Editors, Prof. Dr. Livia Puljak (Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb, Croatia) and Prof. Dr. Martin Wolkewitz (University of Freiburg, Germany).  


  1. Pandemic events often trigger a surge of clinical trial activity aimed at rapidly evaluating therapeutic or preventative interventions. Ensuring rapid public access to the complete and unbiased trial record is...

    Authors: Christopher W. Jones, Amanda C. Adams, Elizabeth Murphy, Rachel P. King, Benjamin Saracco, Karen R. Stesis, Susan Cavanaugh, Brian W. Roberts and Timothy F. Platts-Mills
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:120
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  2. In the last decade Open Science principles have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and research...

    Authors: Lonni Besançon, Nathan Peiffer-Smadja, Corentin Segalas, Haiting Jiang, Paola Masuzzo, Cooper Smout, Eric Billy, Maxime Deforet and Clémence Leyrat
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:117
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  3. During the COVID-19 emergency, IRST IRCCS, an Italian cancer research institute and promoter of no profit clinical studies, adapted its activities and procedures as per European and national guidelines to main...

    Authors: Linda Valmorri, Bernadette Vertogen, Chiara Zingaretti, Anna Miserocchi, Roberta Volpi, Alberto Clemente, Isabella Bondi, Irene Valli, Britt Rudnas, Giovanni Martinelli and Oriana Nanni
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:91
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  4. The COVID-19 pandemic has become a source of fear across the world. Measuring the level or significance of fear in different populations may help identify populations and areas in need of public health and edu...

    Authors: Ashley Elizabeth Muller, Jan Peter William Himmels and Stijn Van de Velde
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:82
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  5. The spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 has suspended many non-COVID-19 related research activities. Where restarting research activities is permitted, investigators need to evaluate the ...

    Authors: Suzanne M. Simkovich, Lisa M. Thompson, Maggie L. Clark, Kalpana Balakrishnan, Alejandra Bussalleu, William Checkley, Thomas Clasen, Victor G. Davila-Roman, Anaite Diaz-Artiga, Ephrem Dusabimana, Lisa de las Fuentes, Steven Harvey, Miles A. Kirby, Amy Lovvorn, Eric D. McCollum, Erick E. Mollinedo…
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:68
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  6. Outbreaks of infectious diseases generate outbreaks of scientific evidence. In 2016 epidemics of Zika virus emerged, and in 2020, a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) caused a p...

    Authors: Aziz Mert Ipekci, Diana Buitrago-Garcia, Kaspar Walter Meili, Fabienne Krauer, Nirmala Prajapati, Shabnam Thapa, Lea Wildisen, Lucia Araujo-Chaveron, Lukas Baumann, Sanam Shah, Tessa Whiteley, Gonzalo Solís-García, Foteini Tsotra, Ivan Zhelyazkov, Hira Imeri, Nicola Low…
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:50
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  7. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage on, and clinical research has been promoted worldwide. We aimed to assess the clinical and methodological characteristics of treatment clinical trials that have been set...

    Authors: Beatrice Mainoli, Tiago Machado, Gonçalo S. Duarte, Luísa Prada, Nilza Gonçalves, Joaquim J. Ferreira and João Costa
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:42
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  8. COVID-19 has led to the adoption of unprecedented mitigation measures which could trigger many unintended consequences. These unintended consequences can be far-reaching and just as important as the intended o...

    Authors: Anne-Marie Turcotte-Tremblay, Idriss Ali Gali Gali and Valéry Ridde
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:28
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  9. The rising burden of the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic in South Africa has motivated the application of modeling strategies to predict the COVID-19 cases and deaths. Reliable and accurate short and long-term forec...

    Authors: Tarylee Reddy, Ziv Shkedy, Charl Janse van Rensburg, Henry Mwambi, Pravesh Debba, Khangelani Zuma and Samuel Manda
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:15
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  11. Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, a large number of COVID-19-related papers have been published. However, concerns about the risk of expedited science have been raised. We aimed at reviewing and catego...

    Authors: Marc Raynaud, Huanxi Zhang, Kevin Louis, Valentin Goutaudier, Jiali Wang, Quentin Dubourg, Yongcheng Wei, Zeynep Demir, Charlotte Debiais, Olivier Aubert, Yassine Bouatou, Carmen Lefaucheur, Patricia Jabre, Longshan Liu, Changxi Wang, Xavier Jouven…
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2021 21:1
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  12. In most countries, the official statistics for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) take account of in-hospital deaths but not those that occur at home. The study’s objective was to introduce a methodology ...

    Authors: Hervé Hubert, Valentine Baert, Jean-Baptiste Beuscart and Emmanuel Chazard
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:305
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  13. In recent months, multiple efforts have sought to characterize COVID-19 social distancing policy responses. These efforts have used various coding frameworks, but many have relied on coding methodologies that ...

    Authors: Jeff Lane, Michelle M. Garrison, James Kelley, Priya Sarma and Aaron Katz
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:298
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  15. Classic epidemic curves – counts of daily events or cumulative events over time –emphasise temporal changes in the growth or size of epidemic outbreaks. Like any graph, these curves have limitations: they are ...

    Authors: Thomas Perneger, Antoine Kevorkian, Thierry Grenet, Hubert Gallée and Angèle Gayet-Ageron
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:248
    Content type: Technical advance Published on:

    The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:265

  17. Contact tracing data of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic is used to estimate basic epidemiological parameters. Contact tracing data could also be potentially used for assessin...

    Authors: Karikalan Nagarajan, Malaisamy Muniyandi, Bharathidasan Palani and Senthil Sellappan
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:233
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  18. COVID-19, the disease caused by the highly infectious and transmissible coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has quickly become a morbid global pandemic. Although the impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children is less clin...

    Authors: Rosiane Lima, Elizabeth F. Gootkind, Denis De la Flor, Laura J. Yockey, Evan A. Bordt, Paolo D’Avino, Shen Ning, Katerina Heath, Katherine Harding, Jaclyn Zois, Grace Park, Margot Hardcastle, Kathleen A. Grinke, Sheila Grimmel, Susan P. Davidson, Pamela J. Forde…
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:228
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  19. Because of unknown features of the COVID-19 and the complexity of the population affected, standard clinical trial designs on treatments may not be optimal in such patients. We propose two independent clinical...

    Authors: Shesh N. Rai, Chen Qian, Jianmin Pan, Anand Seth, Deo Kumar Srivastava and Aruni Bhatnagar
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:220
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  20. Collection of biospecimens is a critical first step to understanding the impact of COVID-19 on pregnant women and newborns - vulnerable populations that are challenging to enroll and at risk of exclusion from ...

    Authors: Lydia L. Shook, Jessica E. Shui, Adeline A. Boatin, Samantha Devane, Natalie Croul, Lael M. Yonker, Juan D. Matute, Rosiane S. Lima, Muriel Schwinn, Dana Cvrk, Laurel Gardner, Robin Azevedo, Suzanne Stanton, Evan A. Bordt, Laura J. Yockey, Alessio Fasano…
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:215
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  21. As the whole world is experiencing the cascading effect of a new pandemic, almost every aspect of modern life has been disrupted. Because of health emergencies during this period, widespread fear has resulted ...

    Authors: Atanu Bhattacharjee, Gajendra K. Vishwakarma, Souvik Banerjee and Sharvari Shukla
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:209
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  22. The coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) presents a variety of challenges for ongoing clinical trials, including an inevitably higher rate of missing outcome data, with new and non-standard reasons for missingness....

    Authors: Suzie Cro, Tim P. Morris, Brennan C. Kahan, Victoria R. Cornelius and James R. Carpenter
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:208
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  23. The clinical progress of patients hospitalized due to COVID-19 is often associated with severe pneumonia which may require intensive care, invasive ventilation, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). T...

    Authors: Derek Hazard, Klaus Kaier, Maja von Cube, Marlon Grodd, Lars Bugiera, Jerome Lambert and Martin Wolkewitz
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:206
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  24. The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases divided by population size is used as a coarse measurement for the burden of disease in a population. However, this fraction depends heavily on the sampling intensity and...

    Authors: Ola Brynildsrud
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:196
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  25. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in December 2019, a substantial body of COVID-19 medical literature has been generated. As of June 2020, gaps and longitudinal trends in the COVID-19 medical litera...

    Authors: Nan Liu, Marcel Lucas Chee, Chenglin Niu, Pin Pin Pek, Fahad Javaid Siddiqui, John Pastor Ansah, David Bruce Matchar, Sean Shao Wei Lam, Hairil Rizal Abdullah, Angelique Chan, Rahul Malhotra, Nicholas Graves, Mariko Siyue Koh, Sungwon Yoon, Andrew Fu Wah Ho, Daniel Shu Wei Ting…
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:177
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  27. The research community reacted rapidly to the emergence of COVID-19. We aimed to assess characteristics of journal articles, preprint articles, and registered trial protocols about COVID-19 and its causal agen...

    Authors: Mahir Fidahic, Danijela Nujic, Renata Runjic, Marta Civljak, Filipa Markotic, Zvjezdana Lovric Makaric and Livia Puljak
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:161
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  28. We aimed to assess the feasibility of using multiple technologies to recruit and conduct cognitive interviews among young people across the United States to test items measuring sexual and reproductive empower...

    Authors: Ushma D. Upadhyay and Heather Lipkovich
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:159
    Content type: Technical advance Published on:

  29. Despite widespread use, the accuracy of the diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2 infection is poorly understood. The aim of our work was to better quantify misclassification errors in identification of true cases of...

    Authors: Igor Burstyn, Neal D. Goldstein and Paul Gustafson
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:146
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  30. We investigated the feasibility of using a machine learning tool’s relevance predictions to expedite title and abstract screening.

    Authors: Allison Gates, Michelle Gates, Meghan Sebastianski, Samantha Guitard, Sarah A. Elliott and Lisa Hartling
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:139
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  31. The COVID-19 pandemic has evolved into one of the most impactful health crises in modern history, compelling researchers to explore innovative ways to efficiently collect public health data in a timely manner....

    Authors: Shahmir H. Ali, Joshua Foreman, Ariadna Capasso, Abbey M. Jones, Yesim Tozan and Ralph J. DiClemente
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:116
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  32. Rapid reviews (RRs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to time-consuming systematic reviews—they can help meet the demand for accelerated evidence synthesis to inform decision-making in healthcare. The s...

    Authors: Ingrid Arevalo-Rodriguez, Karen R. Steingart, Andrea C. Tricco, Barbara Nussbaumer-Streit, David Kaunelis, Pablo Alonso-Coello, Susan Baxter, Patrick M. Bossuyt, José Ignacio Emparanza and Javier Zamora
    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2020 20:115
    Content type: Research article Published on: