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

Serge P.J.M. Horbach

For our analysis, we use a repository of Covid-19 related research articles established by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS). The repository is based on databases of CORD19, Dimensions and the World Health Organisation (WHO), and includes articles on Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, and related (corona) viruses and infectious diseases. In particular, this means that the database contains journal articles and preprints that predate the current Covid-19 pandemic, as it for instance also includes articles on the 2002 SARS virus and disease. For brevity's sake, all such articles will in the remainder of this article by described as 'Covid-19 related' articles. A full description of the database as well as access to all relevant data is available (CWTS, 2020). Colavizza et al. (2020) provide a description and analysis of parts of this database. All results in this article are based on the April 4 release of the database. We note that the majority of articles in the dataset originates from the CORD19 database. Some doubt has been raised about the relevance of some of this database's articles to the current pandemic (Colavizza et al., 2020) , but for our purposes, the scope of the database seems reasonable. Based on this dataset, several analyses were performed: