Pandemic Publishing: Medical journals drastically speed up their publication process for Covid-19

Serge P.J.M. Horbach

We analysed the duration of the publication process, in number of days, for a sample of 529 journal articles. 259 articles were published during the present pandemic (i.e. from Jan 1, 2020) and 270 were published prior to the pandemic (i.e. before Oct 1, 2019). The articles were published in 14 different journals. Journals were selected based on their number of articles both prior to and during the current pandemic as well as the availability of data on when articles were submitted, accepted and published. We selected the ten journals publishing most Covid-19 related articles in general, supplemented by the five journals publishing most Covid-19 related content since the start of the pandemic, that make publication data (submission, acceptance and publish) available. One journal, Viruses, matches both criteria. The list of journals used in this analysis, including their number of articles, as well as the journals discarded because no data on submission, acceptance or publication dates was available, is added as supplementary material A. From those journals, we sampled all articles published since the start of the pandemic and matched those to an equal number of articles published in the same journal prior to the pandemic to form a control group. In case the control group had fewer articles, we used this number of articles and only selected the most recent articles after the pandemic. In case less than ten articles were published since the start of the pandemic, we nonetheless sampled ten articles for the control group. For the control group, we sampled articles starting with publications in 2019 (but before Oct 1 st ) and moving backwards, in order to make sure editorial policies most closely resemble those in the pandemic. Table 1 presents the list of journals used, including the number of articles sampled per journal. Information on the dates of submission, acceptance and publication was manually retrieved from the journal's webpage. In case journals distinguished between publication online and appearance in the print issue of the journal, we selected the date of online publication.