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

Serge P.J.M. Horbach

Some of the most prominent, high impact medical journals are not part of our sample, because they do not share all relevant data on submission, acceptance and publication dates. Comparing the total number of published articles in high impact journals such as BMJ, The Lancet, JAMA and NEJM does not give a clear indication of faster publication: These four journals published 864, 421, 351, and 307 articles respectively in 2020, according to a Web of Science search. Over the same period in 2019 they published 874, 497, 335, and 334 articles respectively. Hence, most show a small decrease in the total number of published articles. Consequently, if they managed to speed up their publication process for Covid-19 related articles, this has gone at the expense of other content being published less, or less quickly.