On the crucial role of multilingual biomedical databases in epidemic events (SARS-CoV-2 analysis)

Highlights

• Multilingual databases and translation are needed in biomedical sciences.

• With the appearance of new quick-spreading diseases, information becomes crucial for healthcare decision-making.

• Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 data on PubMed and Yiigle showed that in the beginning of the epidemic event, most practical articles were available only in Chinese.

• We point out that quality assurance must also be taken into account rather than only multilingual articles.

Abstract

The need for multilingual biomedical databases was already pointed out by different authors. They argue about the need for making translations available in other languages and centralized access to regional databases and that one should not disregard citations in other languages. This fact could not be any more real in the current situation regarding the novel coronavirus. When considering treatment, diagnosis and prevention, around 44% of the articles in PubMed were written in Chinese. This prompts the urgent need for quality automatic translation to make such extremely valuable information available to medical personnel in as many languages as possible. We also point out that the community should also make efforts to guarantee editorial quality and to follow the best practices in editing and publishing. This is of critical importance as well, such that the content is properly scrutinized before being published.