Artificial-intelligence tools aim to tame the coronavirus literature

The COVID-19 literature has grown in much the same way as the disease’s transmission: exponentially. The NIH’s COVID-19 Portfolio, a website that tracks papers related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the disease it causes, lists more than 28,000 articles — far too many for any researcher to read (See ‘Explosive Growth’; code and data at https://github.com/jperkel/covidlit). But a fast-growing set of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools might help researchers and clinicians to quickly sift through the literature.