Learning about research and information from the Covid-19 pandemic. No.2. The most current information is found online.

For the most current and up-to-date information, look online.

While books and journals are useful and valuable for background reading, they are not the best resources for keeping up to date where new discoveries are being made and communicated everyday as is the case with the fight against the Covid-19 virus.

The last few weeks have seen universities and research institutes create new websites, twitter feeds and blogs to help share information as quickly as possible so others working on the virus can benefit from what they have learned. Together by sharing information they hope to build on each other's research and create tests, treatments and vaccines as quickly as possible. They can also be share the information quickly globally. An example of  scientists and academics from different institutions working together in the UK is the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium. 

The Cambridge Fighting COVID website is sharing information through a weekly update (via zoom and then the recording is made available afterwards). It may be considered by some to be raw and unpolished communication in this form (it is not edited with revisions like a book) but it is current, useful and credible (i.e. provided by the scientists and researchers themselves).

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/covid-19-virus-coronavirus-pandemic-4922384/

How does this apply to student research?

When researching a topic for an assignment, even if you use books and journal articles, it is always useful to refer to the most up to date developments too. Look online for trustworthy websites and social media.

In order to keep up to date whilst pulling together resources for your research, you may want to consider:-

• following key twitter feeds, blogs or Instagram accounts etc. 
• setting up alerts in library/ LRC databases so you are emailed when something new appears in the database on your chosen topic. 
• setting up saved searches you can re- run at intervals to pick up anything new.
  In order to do the last 2 options, you will usually need to set up an account within the database (this may be a further step to your OpenAthens login).

For recent events, newspaper articles and reputable news websites will be the best place to look. Websites like the BBC will even have some analysis on how things are understood at the time as events unfold but be aware time may prove that analysis to be wrong. (A historian would find this useful in itself as evidence of how people were interpreting the events at the time).

Over time more and more research on Covid-19 will probably be published formally in journals and books by the experts involved but I suspect at the moment there isn't time!