For published research related to COVID-19, looked at two lists of publications: the "Dimensions COVID-19 Publications" list and the "COVID-19 Open Research Dataset "(CORD-19). These lists are regularly updated. The date this study used for the cutoff for these lists is July 1, 2020. They merged the two lists and then removed the duplicates.

For information in Wikipedia, data from Almetric, which provides Wikipedia citation data, was used. They needed up with a final set of 94,600 COVID-19 related publications.

They also used data from Dimensions to get citation counts for COVID-19 related publications.