ArticlePLOS digital health2022
Real-time estimation of the epidemic reproduction number: Scoping review of the applications and challenges.
Article in PLOS digital health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Machine learning and probabilistic approaches for forecasting infectious disease transmission and cases.International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases · 2026Article
- Unjustified Poisson assumptions lead to overconfident estimates of the effective reproductive number.Epidemiology and infection · 2026Article
- Robust estimation of the time-dependent reproduction number in the presence of weekend reporting effects.BMC global and public health · 2026Article
- A real-time early warning system to anticipate respiratory disease outbreaks using transfer learning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Integrated Genomic and Epidemiological Surveillance to Monitor SARS-CoV-2 Variants in Italy: Insights From the JN.1 Case Study (2023-2024).Journal of medical virology · 2026Article
- Article
- Unlocking the power of time-since-infection models: data augmentation for improved instantaneous reproduction number estimation.Biostatistics (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Real-time inference of the end of an outbreak: Temporally aggregated disease incidence data and under-reporting.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2025Article
- A Primer on Inference and Prediction With Epidemic Renewal Models and Sequential Monte Carlo.Statistics in medicine · 2025Article
- Simulation-based inference of the time-dependent reproduction number from temporally aggregated and under-reported disease incidence time series data.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Article
- Evaluating a novel reproduction number estimation method: a comparative analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Causal inference concepts can guide research into the effects of climate on infectious diseases.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Time-varying reproduction number estimation: fusing compartmental models with generalized additive models.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Time-varying reproductive number estimation for practical application in structured populations.Epidemiologic methods · 2025Article
- The Impact of Public Health and Social Measures (PHSMs) on SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in the WHO European Region (2020-2022).Influenza and other respiratory viruses · 2024Article
- A framework for counterfactual analysis, strategy evaluation, and control of epidemics using reproduction number estimates.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Bayesian estimation of the time-varying reproduction number for pulmonary tuberculosis in Iran: A registry-based study from 2018 to 2022 using new smear-positive cases.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2024Article
- Challenges in the case-based surveillance of infectious diseases.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Incorporating testing volume into estimation of effective reproduction number dynamics.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, (Statistics in Society) · 2024Article
- Increasing situational awareness through nowcasting of the reproduction number.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The time-varying reproduction number (Rt) is an important measure of transmissibility during outbreaks. Estimating whether and how rapidly an outbreak is growing (Rt > 1) or declining (Rt < 1) can inform the design, monitoring and adjustment of control measures in real-time. We use a popular R package for Rt estimation, EpiEstim, as a case study to evaluate the contexts in which Rt estimation methods have been used and identify unmet needs which would enable broader applicability of these methods in real-time. A scoping review, complemented by a small EpiEstim user survey, highlight issues with the current approaches, including the quality of input incidence data, the inability to account for geographical factors, and other methodological issues. We summarise the methods and software developed to tackle the problems identified, but conclude that significant gaps remain which should be addressed to enable easier, more robust and applicable estimation of Rt during epidemics.
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.