The call ‘Corona: fast-track data’ is developed by the NWO to provide funding for projects that collect data that can only be conducted now, during the COVID-19 crisis, and specifically research into issues that arise in society during the crisis. The ASReview project was one of the awardees of these NWO fast grants with our project titled ” Saving time and sanity – real-time data collection for systematic reviews on COVID-19“.

From the application:

The Knowlegde Institute Federation of Medical Specialists receives urgent, nationwide prioritized COVID-19 related questions from medical doctors. To answer these questions, they develop evidence-based guidelines. They systematically search for relevant papers in large datasets. However, screening hundreds, or even thousands of papers, is time consuming, time we do not have right now. Therefore, we are developing Open Source software which automatically collects data (COVID-19 related papers) and uses artificial intelligence to find relevant papers as quickly as possible.