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Living evidence, such as Living Mapping Reviews (LMR) and Living Systematic Reviews (LSR), can play a key role in fast-moving scientific fields and global health situations, helping to overcome the challenges of traditional, static evidence that can rapidly become outdated.

In our blog, we speak to Wellcome Open Research authors Alice Norton and Adrian Bucher about the latest and final update to their Living Mapping Review for COVID-19 funded research projects and the value that these articles provide during rapidly evolving global health challenges such as COVID-19.

First, let’s meet the authors

Alice Norton leads the Research and Policy team for the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R) at the University of Oxford Pandemic Sciences Institute, is the Principle Investigator for the new Pandemic PACT programme, and was previously Head of the UKCDR COVID CIRCLE initiative.

Adrian Bucher is the Senior Data Analyst for UKCDR’s COVID CIRCLE initiative. He leads the mapping and analysis of this initiative and of UKCDR’s data work more widely, which includes the management of data on the COVID-19 research project tracker. Adrian also leads UKCDR’s funder work on global disaster resilience.

Could you provide some background on how the UKCDR and GloPID-R COVID-19 research project tracker came into fruition?

The idea for the tracker came at the Global Forum on Research and Innovation for COVID-19 hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and GloPID-R (between 11-12 February 2020), and began as a result of a discussion between the UKCDR and GloPID-R teams on the need to track research funding for COVID-19.

The aim was to set up a simple tracker to give visibility to new research investments on the then novel coronavirus, and to categorise these against the research priorities that were defined at this forum.

Data on research funding was collected either directly from funders or from online sources which were subsequently added to the database. From there, our team would review the titles and abstracts of each individual project and then map these against the aforementioned priorities.

Further project details on research location, funding amounts, and co-applicants were also included in this open access dataset and tracker tool.

How does the Wellcome Open Research Living Mapping Review tie into this?

The aim of establishing the Living Mapping Review on Wellcome Open Research was to provide regular and standardised analyses on this dataset, which could be shared publicly to inform both policy makers and researchers in their decision making during the pandemic.

The overall objective was to reduce duplication of research effort, identify research gaps, improve coordination and collaboration, and prioritise efforts to maximise the impact of research funding.

Similarly, as the global funding response to COVID-19 plateaus, this Living Mapping Review helps both funders and researchers to prioritise new resources, collaborate to ensure funding is targeted towards research areas, locations, and populations where there is continued greatest unmet research need, and review previous research investments.

The latest, and final update, of the Living Mapping Review provides an updated detailed descriptive analysis of the database (on data from three months after version nine) and focuses analysis on research gaps, research areas in need of coordination, study populations and research locations (with a focus on resource-limited countries).

You wrote a blog for us on the project’s progress around the mid-point of the project, and now the project is coming to its completion. What have you achieved with the project since then?

As research funders increasingly shift their focus towards a post-pandemic world, we completed the mapping of the full database to the UN Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery, which allowed greater insight into the research activities during the later stage of the pandemic.

We also undertook further collaborative work with the WHO on the Social Sciences and Ethics research portfolios for COVID-19 to refine these aspects further for our future work and understand the research response in these areas during the pandemic.

Since the last blog, we have produced two learning reports as part of the COVID CIRCLE initiative which used evidence from research funding response globally and with a particular focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the first and second years of the pandemic to inform ongoing and future responses.

The reports highlight some of the enablers and barriers to implementing key principles for supporting high-quality research for the most pressing global needs in epidemics and pandemics, as well as provide recommendations for research funders to improve the implementation of these principles.

You can read the full reports for 2021 and 2022 via the UKCDR website.

Why was a Living Mapping Review chosen for this project?

A Living Mapping Review is similar to a Living Systematic Review, which is a review that is continually updated, incorporating relevant new evidence as it becomes available.

This article type provides the same benefits as the standard Systematic Review, but while most standard ones are static snapshots of the evidence at the time the study was conducted, Living Systematic Reviews can be monitored even after publication. This means new findings can be added, so they are particularly valuable for monitoring and keeping up to date with the latest available evidence. 

A Living Mapping Review was best suited for our research due to the rapidly expanding funding landscape during the pandemic and the trend for increased sharing of funding details during that period.

We wanted to provide regular updates to the analyses for our stakeholders and provide them with an overview of the evolution of tracker dataset, and underlying research funding landscape, in an accessible format to inform their practice in this fast-moving environment.

What impact has this tracker has on the global response to COVID-19?

Our research has informed the decisions of global research funders, policy makers, and researchers throughout the pandemic, and it has clearly demonstrated the benefits of tracking research funding to inform practice.

It has been cited as ‘instrumental in reaching global funding decisions’ in the WHO Overall Achievements Report released for the first year’s research response to the pandemic, as well as being highlighted in the ‘R&D Preparedness Ecosystem: Preparedness for Health Emergencies Report to the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board’ (2020) and ‘UN Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery’ (2020).

Are there any next steps in your research?

Building on the success of our COVID CIRCLE initiative, we are expanding our work now to develop the new Pandemic Analytical Capacity and Funding Tracking Programme (Pandemic PACT). This programme will collate global funding tracking for a wide range of epidemic prone diseases and broader epidemic and pandemic research preparedness activities on an ongoing basis.

This initiative, led by GloPID-R in partnership with UKCDR, aims for greater impact on improving the global coherence of research responses to future outbreaks. Pandemic PACT will develop a broad prospective research funding tracking and analysis capability linked to major funding decision makers. It will map research funding against research domains, research agendas, and living Rapid Research Needs Appraisals.

The outputs will include an interactive database of the relevant research funding landscape mapped against domains and priority roadmaps; regular analyses of funding trends and research gaps; and a standing capability to rapidly identify research needs in the event of a novel outbreak of disease.

These outputs will support evidence informed decision-making and coordination by the world’s major research funders and key policy stakeholders through directly feeding into GloPID-R’s response plan and regional hubs, with the goal of improved efficiency and effectiveness of research responses.

Why did you choose to publish your Living Mapping Review with Wellcome Open Research?

We were keen to publish with Wellcome Open Research due to our shared values of open publishing and review for this globally important dataset. Publishing on Wellcome Open Research meant that this was an open access publication, resulting in greater reach than regular grey literature reports and easier access for our stakeholders to implement the analysis within their strategies.

We have found Wellcome Open Research to be a very supportive publisher, who engaged with us very closely from the design phase of the project and throughout each update to the Living Mapping Review.

You can read the full Living Mapping Review, as well as the open peer review reports for each update, via Wellcome Open Research, ‘A living mapping review for COVID-19 funded research projects: final (27 month) update’.

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