September 29, 2014

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Scholarly articles and other sources about the Ebola outbreak

While there has been some high quality news reporting about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, it is also easy to find vague, misleading or erroneous information about the disease and the outbreak.

By Bonnie Swoger

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

While there has been some high quality news reporting about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, it is also easy to find vague, misleading or erroneous information about the disease and the outbreak. News related to the outbreak may also prompt more folks to explore the scholarly scientific literature on the subject. The list below contains some reliable information sources on the topic.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Disaster Information Management Research Center released an excellent guide to Ebola information resources. Many of the links in this post are also available from the NLM guide.

General information about the disease

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News stories and collections

Scholarly materials

The National Library of Medicine has initiated an Emergency Access Initiative (EAI) for scholarly papers related to Ebola. The EAI is a partnership between the National Library of Medicine (the folks behind the PubMed biomedical research database) and the companies and organizations that publish scholarly articles. The EAI allows healthcare professionals, policy makes, librarians, and others involved in a health disaster event to temporarily access scholarly articles on the topic that would generally only be available to subscribers. Affected folks hoping to access the information need to login at the EAI site, then continue on to PubMed. Once you get to PubMed, you can limit your search to articles available for free through the program. The current EAI allows access until October 17, 2014.

Many publishers have put together collections of ebola related articles available for free on their websites, including:

Of particular interest is an interactive map and timeline of the outbreak, discussed in detail by Larry Greenemeier on the Scientific American website.

Governmental websites

This list is only a small portion of the high quality information sources available. Feel free to share your go-to high-quality information resources in the comments.

About Bonnie Swoger

Bonnie J. M. Swoger is a Science and Technology Librarian at a small public undergraduate institution in upstate New York, SUNY Geneseo. She teaches students about the science literature, helps faculty and students with library research questions and leads library assessment efforts. She has a BS in Geology from St. Lawrence University, an MS in Geology from Kent State University and an MLS from the University at Buffalo. She would love to have some free time in which to indulge in hobbies. She blogs at the Undergraduate Science Librarian and can be found on twitter @bonnieswoger.

More by Bonnie Swoger

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