  The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects throughout
society, and science is no exception. The scale, speed, and breadth of the
scientific community's COVID-19 response has lead to the emergence of new
research literature on a remarkable scale -- as of October 2020, over 81,000
COVID-19 related scientific papers have been released, at a rate of over 250
per day. This has created a challenge to traditional methods of engagement with
the research literature; the volume of new research is far beyond the ability
of any human to read, and the urgency of response has lead to an increasingly
prominent role for pre-print servers and a diffusion of relevant research
across sources. These factors have created a need for new tools to change the
way scientific literature is disseminated. COVIDScholar is a knowledge portal
designed with the unique needs of the COVID-19 research community in mind,
utilizing NLP to aid researchers in synthesizing the information spread across
thousands of emergent research articles, patents, and clinical trials into
actionable insights and new knowledge. The search interface for this corpus,
https://covidscholar.org, now serves over 2000 unique users weekly. We present
also an analysis of trends in COVID-19 research over the course of 2020.
