COVID-19 L·OVE repository is highly comprehensive and can be used as a single source for COVID-19 studies

Background and Objective

The coronavirus disease 2019 Living OVerview of Evidence (COVID-19 L·OVE) is a public repository and classification platform for COVID-19 articles. The repository contains more than 430,000 articles as of September 20, 2021 and intends to provide a one-stop shop for COVID-19 evidence. Considering that systematic reviews conduct high-quality searches, this study assesses the comprehensiveness and currency of the repository against the total number of studies in a representative sample of COVID-19 systematic reviews.

Methods

Our sample was generated from all the studies included in the systematic reviews of COVID-19 published during April 2021. We estimated the comprehensiveness of COVID-19 L·OVE repository by determining how many of the individual studies in the sample were included in the COVID-19 L·OVE repository. We estimated the currency as the percentage of studies that was available in the COVID-19 L·OVE repository at the time the systematic reviews conducted their own search.

Results

We identified 83 eligible systematic reviews that included 2,132 studies. COVID-19 L·OVE had an overall comprehensiveness of 99.67% (2,125/2,132). The overall currency of the repository, that is, the proportion of articles that would have been obtained if the search of the reviews was conducted in COVID-19 L·OVE instead of searching the original sources, was 96.48% (2,057/2,132). Both the comprehensiveness and the currency were 100% for randomized trials (82/82).

Conclusion

The COVID-19 L·OVE repository is highly comprehensive and current. Using this repository instead of traditional manual searches in multiple databases can save a great amount of work to people conducting systematic reviews and would improve the comprehensiveness and timeliness of evidence syntheses. This tool is particularly important for supporting living evidence synthesis processes.