  Similar to other electron correlation methods, many-body perturbation theory
methods based on Green functions, such as the so-called $GW$ approximation,
suffer from the usual slow convergence of energetic properties with respect to
the size of the one-electron basis set. This displeasing feature is due to lack
of explicit electron-electron terms modeling the infamous Kato
electron-electron cusp and the correlation Coulomb hole around it. Here, we
propose a computationally efficient density-based basis set correction based on
short-range correlation density functionals which significantly speeds up the
convergence of energetics towards the complete basis set limit. The performance
of this density-based correction is illustrated by computing the ionization
potentials of the twenty smallest atoms and molecules of the GW100 test set at
the perturbative $GW$ (or $G_0W_0$) level using increasingly large basis sets.
We also compute the ionization potentials of the five canonical nucleobases
(adenine, cytosine, thymine, guanine, and uracil) and show that, here again, a
significant improvement is obtained.
