For data about research on COVI-19, data was taken from two different sets: a database of COVID-19 related publications established by the WHO and a file containing COVID-10 related articles, preprints, datasets, and clinical trials from Dimensions.ai. Looking at publications between January 1 ,2020 and March 31, 2020, they extracted 6162 publications for their dataset.

Altmetric.com was used to extract Twitter data. They looked at Tweets that mentioned publications from their dataset, and found 4195 of their 6162 publications to have Twitter mention data. They extracted 1,374,231 distinct tweets from 655,494 unique Twitter users. Only English tweets were extracted. Information abut the full tweet text, the date posted, the hashtags used, the number of retweets received, the language of the tweet, and profiles of the Twitter users was also extracted.