Network Graph Representation of COVID-19 Scientific Publications to Aid Knowledge Discovery

Introduction Numerous scientific journal articles have been rapidly published related to COVID-19 making navigation and understanding of relationships difficult. Methods A graph network was constructed from the publicly available CORD-19 database of COVID-19-related publications using an engine leveraging medical knowledgebases to identify discrete medical concepts and an open source tool (Gephi) used to visualise the network. Results The network shows connections between disease, medication and procedures identified from title and abstracts of 195,958 COVID-19 related publications (CORD-19 Dataset). Connections between terms with few publications, those unconnected to the main network and those irrelevant were not displayed. Nodes were coloured by knowledgebase and node size related to the number of publications containing the term. The dataset and visualisations made publicly accessible via a webtool. Conclusion Knowledge management approaches (text mining and graph networks) can effectively allow rapid navigation and exploration of entity interrelationships to improve understanding of diseases such as COVID-19.