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In her role as Head of COVID CIRCLE at UK Collaborative on Development Research (UKCDR), Alice Norton has focused on improving the research response during the COVID-19 pandemic, paying particular attention to research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).   

To review all the research projects for COVID-19, Alice and her team used a Living Mapping Review. Last month, they published Version four on Wellcome Open Research, presenting a nine-month update review of all research projects within the COVID-19 project tracker between 1^st January 2020 and 15^th April 2021. In this blog post, she tells us how this article type can identify funding gaps and avoid duplication of research efforts. 

Coordinating research efforts 

In 2020, researchers rapidly responded and collaborated to combat COVID-19. With limited resources, the upsurge of research efforts needed to be coordinated to ensure projects would be sufficient and could achieve their aims.   

Two funder coordination groups, UKCDR and Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R), worked together to create the COVID-19 project tracker, which then formed part of their joint COVID CIRCLE initiative. Setting up the tracker early in the pandemic improved the visibility of the research funding and facilitated global collaboration to maximise the impact of research funding. This helped to align the research priorities identified through the joint WHO and GloPID-R Research forum and the resulting roadmap. The tracker collates projects relating to COVID-19 from funders around the world and codes these to the WHO COVID-19 Roadmap.  

Sharing this information and the underlying data makes the research response more coherent and efficient by working on the agreed research priorities. We quickly realised that many audiences would benefit from further analyses of these data and would enhance their use.  So, our Living Mapping Review would supplement the database, providing the necessary analysis and updates every three months on the global COVID-19 funded research portfolio. 

The need for living evidence   

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. 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 approach was the obvious choice for this work, due to the rapidly expanding funding landscape during the pandemic. This enabled us to set up a standard framework, which stakeholders knew would be regularly updated. The living approach also allowed us to include extra analyses over time.  

From the outset we knew that our stakeholders needed regular analytical updates, so a living publication made perfect sense. Publishing on Wellcome Open Research meant that this was an open access publication, resulting in greater reach than regular grey literature reports.  

The power of tracking COVID-19 research funding in real time

I hope that this Living Mapping Review will continue to reach funders, researchers, and the many further policy stakeholders who influence the research funding landscape for COVID-19. It should improve their ongoing funding responses to fill gaps and reduce duplication. Ideally, these analyses will inform a review of this global funding response to improve global research processes for future epidemics and pandemics.  

This work and analysis are presented on a frequent basis to global funders through UKCDR and GloPID-R to inform their ongoing research funding decisions. We have worked with many individual funders to support their strategic decision making throughout the pandemic. 

Research relating to diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines have now all received substantial investment. We have also focused on analyses on funding for research across LMICs, funding on Long Covid, funding on One Health and Social Sciences.  

We have also worked closely with researcher groups, particularly with the Global Health Network and the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition, to identify research needs across LMICs and map these against the funding response.  

Keeping pace with a fast-moving research environment  

The research funding response has started to plateau, with funders launching fewer COVID-19 specific calls and starting to integrate any continued funding into their standard funding processes. Now, we need to enhance coordination and reprioritise. This Living Mapping Review is even more important to help direct the remaining research funds and activity to areas of continued need and to prevent duplication with ongoing studies.  

Strategic steps for future prioritisation    

With some funders now taking a longer-term view, we are collaborating with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to map the COVID-19 Project Tracker to the UN Research Roadmap for the COVID-19 Recovery research priorities and to support the coordination of the research response to that framework.   

In the future, these data should be used to further learn from the global funding response to COVID-19, in order to continually improve global research policies and processes for future epidemics and pandemics.  

You can read the full Living Mapping Review and the peer review reports via Wellcome Open Research,‘A living mapping review for COVID-19 funded research projects: nine-month update’>>