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

• Main Authors: Felipe Soares, Gabrielli Harumi Yamashita
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2020-07-01
• Series: International Journal of Infectious Diseases
• Subjects: Epidemics; Natural Language Processing; Biomedical databases
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220303301

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.