Searching for Scientific Evidence in a Pandemic: An Overview of TREC-COVID

Understand

We present an overview of the TREC-COVID Challenge, an information retrieval (IR) shared task to evaluate search on scientific literature related to COVID-19.

• The goals of TREC-COVID include the construction of a pandemic search test collection and the evaluation of IR methods for COVID-19.
• The challenge was conducted over five rounds from April to July, 2020, with participation from 92 unique teams and 556 individual submissions.
• A total of 50 topics (sets of related queries) were used in the evaluation, starting at 30 topics for Round 1 and adding 5 new topics per round to target emerging topics at that state of the still-emerging pandemic.