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Publication Patterns' Changes due to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A longitudinal and short-term scientometric analysis
Shir Aviv-Reuven, Ariel Rosenfeld
TL;DR
The study examines biomedical publication patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic, including publication volume, acceptance speed, and international collaboration. It reports increased publication output, with COVID-19 papers associated with reduced international collaboration diversity compared with non-COVID-19 papers and previous years.
Problem
The study addresses how quickly COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 papers are accepted and how international publication and co-authorship changed during the pandemic.
Method
The study analyzes peer-reviewed literature using sources including Scopus and applies a χ2 test to examine international collaboration cases.
Results
Publication increased significantly in peer-reviewed journals and preprint servers, while COVID-19 papers showed lower international collaboration diversity than non-COVID-19 papers and previous years.
Takeaways & Limitations
The findings indicate that pandemic-related publication growth was concentrated in COVID-19 papers, while international collaboration diversity for those papers was reduced.
Takeaways & Limitations
The study is limited by the amount, quality, and diversity of its data, which could skew findings about time to acceptance and collaboration.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
In recent months the COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2 and Coronavirus) pandemic has spread throughout the world. In parallel, extensive scholarly research regarding various aspects of the pandemic has been published. In this work, we analyse the changes in biomedical publishing patterns due to the pandemic. We study the changes in the volume of publications in both peer reviewed journals and preprint servers, average time to acceptance of papers submitted to biomedical journals, international (co-)authorship of these papers (expressed by diversity and volume), and the possible association between journal metrics and said changes. We study these possible changes using two approaches: a short-term analysis through which changes during the first six months of the outbreak are examined for both COVID-19 related papers and non-COVID-19 related papers; and a longitudinal approach through which changes are examined in comparison to the previous four years. Our results show that the pandemic has so far had a tremendous effect on all examined accounts of scholarly publications: A sharp increase in publication volume has been witnessed and it can be almost entirely attributed to the pandemic; a significantly faster mean time to acceptance for COVID-19 papers is apparent, and it has (partially) come at the expense of non-COVID-19 papers; and a significant reduction in international collaboration for COVID-19 papers has also been identified. As the pandemic continues to spread, these changes may cause a slow down in research in non-COVID-19 biomedical fields and bring about a lower rate of international collaboration.
1 Introduction
The pandemic dramatically changed scholarly publishing, prompting this study to examine publication volume, acceptance speed, international collaboration, and journal metrics across COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 research.
- Research scope: The study examines how the pandemic changed publication volume in journals and preprint servers.
- Research questions: The analysis tests whether journal scientometric scores are associated with COVID-19 publication output.
- Research questions: The study compares COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 papers across acceptance time and international collaboration.International collaboration is assessed through country diversity and the number of internationally co-authored publications.
- Study design: The researchers combine short-term analysis of the first six months of 2020 with longitudinal comparisons across 2016–2020.Statistical tests compare COVID-19 with non-COVID-19 papers and pandemic-era publications with earlier publications.
- Study scope: The study covers peer-reviewed journals and preprint servers, whose biomedical use was limited before the pandemic.
- Significance: The authors argue that persistent changes could affect non-COVID-19 research and international collaboration, with implications for editorial, hiring, promotion, and funding decisions.
2 Background and Related Work
Prior scientometric studies mainly examined COVID-19 publications using short-term or longitudinal analyses, while this study broadens the comparison across paper types, venues, and publication characteristics.
- Existing studies: Earlier studies examined COVID-19 publication growth, countries, institutions, authors, journals, keywords, and publication types.
- Research gap: Most prior work focused on COVID-19 papers and did not examine unrelated papers published during the pandemic.Homolak et al. was identified as an exception that considered both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 papers.
- Longitudinal evidence: Longitudinal studies reported spikes in coronavirus-related research after SARS and MERS and examined publication and collaboration patterns over extended periods.
- International collaboration: Prior collaboration studies found that virus-affected and higher-GDP countries tended to publish more internationally, while team sizes and internationally collaborative papers declined during the pandemic’s first months.
- Preprints: Previous research documented rapid preprint growth, including a reported doubling of COVID-19 papers every 15 days.
- Contribution: This study contributes short-term and longitudinal comparisons of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 papers across journals and preprint servers, including acceptance time and collaboration diversity.
- Contribution: The authors characterize the work as the most extensive scientometric-based study of COVID-19 publications to date.
3 Methodology
The study combines records from biomedical databases, preprint repositories, and journal indicators, then compares publication patterns across COVID-19 status and years using cleaned metadata and statistical analysis.
- Data sources: Data come from bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, ScienceDirect, Scopus, PubMed, and ScimagoJR.These sources provide preprints, journal articles, biomedical metadata, and journal or country indicators.
- Data cleaning: Records with duplicate identifiers, missing key metadata, inaccurate dates, or insufficient date information were removed; 347 of 7419 papers were excluded.
- Data collection: COVID-19 records were retrieved with coronavirus-related queries, while longitudinal records covered the first six months of 2016–2020.
- Analytic dimensions: The analysis uses publication volume, journal scientometric indicators, time to acceptance, and international collaboration as its four main dimensions.
- Acceptance time: Time to acceptance is measured from receipt to the earlier of acceptance or online publication, excluding missing, corrupted, or chronologically invalid records.
- International collaboration: International collaboration is defined by authors from different countries and measured through country diversity and collaborative publication volume.
- Comparative design: The study compares COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 papers during 2020 with pre-pandemic papers from 2016–2019.
4 Results
The pandemic produced a sharp increase in biomedical publication volume across preprint servers and journals, while COVID-19 papers were concentrated in higher-ranked journals and accepted faster than non-COVID-19 papers. International collaboration increased overall but was significantly lower for COVID-19 papers than for non-COVID-19 papers and prior periods.
- Publication growth: COVID-19 publication growth occurred alongside growth in non-COVID-19 papers across the examined preprint servers.The observed increase in COVID-19 publications followed the international spread of the pandemic, although medRxiv showed some decline in June.
- Publication growth: The first six months of 2020 brought a large surge in publications across preprint servers, with COVID-19 papers accounting for much of the increase.In q-bio, total publications nearly doubled while COVID-19 papers increased eightfold; on medRxiv, COVID-19 papers rose from 40 to 1,350.
- Journal metrics: COVID-19 publications were concentrated in higher-ranked journals: 31% appeared in top-ranking journals, compared with 9.8% in bottom-ranking journals.Top-ranking journals had SJR values between 7.516 and 14.55, while only 1.8% of papers appeared in journals with SJR below 0.25 in another reported comparison.
- Time to acceptance: COVID-19 papers had a mean acceptance time of 19.3 days versus 91.3 days for non-COVID-19 papers.The difference was statistically significant across the examined tests, with p < 0.05; in February 2020, non-COVID-19 papers took almost ten times longer.
- International collaboration: COVID-19 papers had significantly fewer collaborating countries than non-COVID-19 papers in all tested periods except May.COVID-19 collaboration was also lower than in 2019, while 2020 non-COVID-19 papers had significantly more collaborating countries than in 2019.
5 Conclusion and Discussion
The study finds that COVID-19 substantially altered biomedical publishing across publication volume, acceptance times, and international collaboration. Growth was concentrated in COVID-19 journal papers, acceptance accelerated for COVID-19 papers while slowing for non-COVID-19 papers, and collaboration diversity declined for COVID-19 research.
- Study design: Two complementary analyses examined biomedical publication-pattern changes using short-term comparisons and longitudinal comparisons with previous years.The study covered peer-reviewed journals and preprint servers.
- Publication volume: A significant increase in published papers occurred in both peer-reviewed journals and preprint servers, with exceptionally large growth at MedRxiv.Preprint-server growth occurred irrespective of COVID-19, whereas journal growth was virtually attributable to COVID-19 papers and non-COVID-19 volume remained similar to previous years.
- Journal metrics: High-ranked journals published more COVID-19 papers than low-ranked journals.The study also compared preprint servers and peer-reviewed journals as dissemination venues for COVID-19 output.
- Acceptance time: Journals lowered acceptance times for COVID-19 papers, while non-COVID-19 papers took longer to accept than in previous years and longer than COVID-19 papers.The authors state that strong supportive evidence exists, but hidden contributors outside the study’s scope cannot be definitively ruled out.
- Implications: Non-increasing non-COVID-19 publication volume combined with longer acceptance times may slow non-COVID-19 research and journal publication.The authors plan further analysis to determine whether such a slowdown can be observed.
- International collaboration: COVID-19 papers had lower international collaboration diversity than non-COVID-19 papers and than in previous years, despite increased collaboration volume.Most COVID-19 papers were authored by one or very few countries; the authors suggest this may reflect the complexity of conducting international studies during the pandemic.