“The pandemic has given incredible opportunities for researchers but it has also been a shock to the academic system, with an explosion of publications and citations for COVID-19 papers. The same effect was not seen in peer review, where men and women received and accepted invitations to evaluate papers at around the same rate. This is probably because women shouldered the burden of childcare and home-schooling during lockdowns, says Flaminio Squazzoni, a social scientist at the University of Milan, Italy, who co-authored the preprint analysis.
Although researchers submitted more papers to journals than last year, on average, growth in submissions from female authors trailed behind growth from male authors across all subject areas, and senior women saw the largest paper penalty (see ‘Lower rates’), according to the analysis of hundreds of thousands of articles sent to Elsevier journals between February and May 1. The pandemic publishing frenzy had winners and losers. (Second was a 2005 paper that suggested that the anti-malaria drug chloroquine inhibited the coronavirus that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in laboratory samples 6, and a paper that argued that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 didn’t emerge from a laboratory was third 7.) Unequal burden That preprint is also the article that attracted the most buzz on social media, according to Altmetric, a London-based firm that monitors metrics other than citations. And the most-cited preprint 5 - a 16 March report from pandemic modellers at Imperial College London that estimated how lockdown and other distancing measures could avert millions of deaths - had a significant effect on UK policy and made worldwide headlines. One of the first papers about COVID-19 to appear in the literature - a 24 January publication in The Lancet about 41 people hospitalized in Wuhan, China 4 - is the most cited. (Estimates differ depending on search terms, database coverage and definitions of a scientific article.) More than 4% of articles listed in the Dimensions database this year are COVID-related, and around 6% of those indexed in PubMed, which mostly covers life sciences, were dedicated to the topic.
By one count, from the Dimensions database, they might even have passed 200,000 by early December (see ‘Coronavirus cascade’). Scientists published well over 100,000 articles about the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The pandemic also fuelled a sharp rise in sharing through preprints (articles posted online before peer review), advanced the output of male authors over female authors and affected review times - speeding them up in some topics but slowing them down in others. The increase was even higher for health and medicine titles, at a whopping 92%. Submissions to publisher Elsevier’s journals alone were up by around 270,000 - or 58% - between February and May when compared with the same period in 2019, one analysis found 1.
But 2020 also saw a sharp increase in articles on all subjects being submitted to scientific journals - perhaps because many researchers had to stay at home and focus on writing up papers rather than conducting science. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted science in 2020 - and transformed research publishing, show data collated and analysed by Nature.Īround 4% of the world’s research output was devoted to the coronavirus in 2020, according to one database.