The dissemination articles of the University of Valencia on COVID-19 get more than two million readings
The 32 articles by specialists from the University of Valencia (UV) published on the scientific dissemination platform The Conversation and republished in more than a hundred of the main Spanish media have received almost two and a half million readings since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The most read, “El virus de la COVID-19 ni se creó ni se escapó de un laboratorio” (‘The COVID-19 virus was neither created in a laboratory nor escaped from one’), which proves the natural origin of these pathogens, from Professor of Genetics Fernando González and also Antonio Figueras and Beatriz Novoa (CSIC), has more than 417,000 visits.
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By areas, of the articles published, 17 are on Basic Sciences and Engineering; 11, on Social Sciences; 3, on Education and 1, on Humanities. The total number of readings of these publications since February 25 (with the publication of the first article, by Fernando González: “¿Qué pasa si el nuevo coronavirus provoca una pandemia?” (‘What happens if the new coronavirus causes a pandemic?’) is 2,411,447.
The second most read article (365,269) is “El origen del coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, a la luz de la evolución” (‘The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, in light of evolution’) and is signed by Juli Peretó, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the UV and by Carlos Briones, senior scientist of the CSIC and member of the Spanish Society of Virology. Experts explain how this coronavirus has arisen by natural selection from the Betacoronavirus genus, within the Coronaviridae family.
As the third most read publication of this period there is “¿Qué sabemos hasta hoy sobre la transmisión del SARS-CoV-2?” (‘What do we know to date about the transmission of SARS-CoV-2?’), also written by Fernando González and by Iñaki Comas, Álvaro Chiner and Ana María García (CSIC).
Manel Porcar, microbiologist and researcher at the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio) of the UV and the CSIC, has written the fourth most read article: “El coronavirus y la fuerza de la selección natural” (‘The coronavirus and the force of natural selection’), with more than 200,000 readings. For its part, the publication “Esto es lo que los virólogos sabemos hasta hoy sobre el coronavirus SARS-CoV-2” (‘This is what virologists know to date about the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus’), signed by twelve researchers, including UV Microbiology professor Javier Buesa, also has more than 200,000 visits.
Theconversation.com, an independent digital platform, open access, free of charge and no advertisement, was created in Australia in 2011. It has nine editions and has more than 85,000 specialists from 2,500 universities and scientific centres. Its monthly audience is 10 million direct readings, with an impact of more than 40 million, as a result of the republication of its content in more than 2,000 media.
The Conversation Spain aims to disclose it to Spanish society and to the Spanish-speaking world. The collaboration agreement between the University of Valencia and this platform was signed in July 2019. Currently, 37 universities plus several Spanish centers maintain collaboration with the entity. The total of readings of the 53 articles published by 47 professors of the University of Valencia in The Conversation since the launch of the collaboration last year amounts to 2,738,728.