Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered so much in the world around us. As described in a recent article in Nature, scholarly publishing has not been immune from COVID-19 related change. This article highlights a number of the most striking changes that have occurred in recent months, showing how the pandemic has, perhaps permanently, altered the landscape of scholarly publishing.
The amount of published research on the topic of COVID-19 has been enormous. It’s estimated that from the start of the pandemic to December 2020, there have been over 200,000 articles published on COVID-19, accounting for around 6% of the total publications entered into PubMed during that time. The paper goes on to show the evolution of several trends within that literature including country of origin and topics covered. While the majority of COVID-19 related articles were published in China during the early phase of the pandemic, as the virus spread around the world, the countries publishing COVID-19 research also changed, with each new area hit by the virus producing a larger share of the total COVID-19 articles than they had before. Additionally, while a majority of the earliest articles focused on topics like modeling the epidemic and slowing the spread, topics such as mental health considerations of the pandemic have grown in prominence in recent months.
One of the most notable trends in scholarly publishing to occur in the time of COVID-19 is the rise of the preprint. Preprints are articles that are made publicly available before having undergone a formal process of peer review. Because of the need to get information in the hands of researchers and clinicians as soon as possible, a significant portion of the COVID-19 literature was released in preprint form. Pre-pandemic, medRxiv, a popular preprint repository covering medical literature, accepted 50-100 preprints per week. During the early months of the pandemic that number rose to 400-500 preprints being added per week, with the vast majority of them being about COVID-19.
Another important recent trend in the world of scholarly publishing has been the increased speed with which manuscripts are being reviewed and articles retracted. The article’s author looked at the peer review turnaround time for 11 medical journals and found that while the review time for non COVID-19 articles remains about the same (roughly 90-110 days), the review time for COVID-19 articles was significantly lower on average (10-30 days). Additionally there has been a noticeable increase in the speed with which papers have been retracted. Prior to COVID-19, the average retracted paper would go years from the time of its publication until it was pulled. During the pandemic that has dropped to months in most cases as COVID-19 related articles have garnered more attention and therefore more scrutiny.
It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these trends will prove permanent once we’ve moved beyond the current pandemic.
Else, H. (2020) How a torrent of COVID science changed research publishing — in seven charts. Nature. 558 (553). https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03564-y
