Panic publishing: An unwarranted consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic

Parmar, Arpit

The COVID-19 pandemic has created havoc in most areas of human lives. Panic behavior is expected during any calamity and disaster (Arafat et al., 2020). Panic buying is a widely discussed behavior in the academic arena. However, another covert panic behavior started creeping in in the scientific forum slowly and steadily. The world saw an invisible pandemic of publishing research papers related to COVID-19. To put that into perspective, LitCovid, the most comprehensive resource on COVID-19, has 58099 publications as of 05/10/2020 (Chen et al., 2020). A leading medical journal with an impact factor of around 30 has published 1003 articles on COVID-19 to date! The People's Republic of China (n=6424) and the United States of America (n=3360) contributed to this list's maximum number of publications. A preliminary search on Harzing's Publish or Perish (using terms "COVID-19", "Novel Coronavirus", and "SARS-CoV-2") gave a total of 274 citation classics (i.e., articles with more than 400 citations each) on COVID-19 published during the last few months! On the other hand, the entire field of neurosurgery had 106 citation classics until 2010 (Ponce & Lozano, 2010)! The number of publications on COVID-19 during the last few months is almost triple of those on HIV over the previous 20 years (sic) (Safieddine & Kassir, 2020)! This rat race to publishing on COVID-19 has many negative impacts on science. The overall quality of published literature is not up to scientific standards. COVID-19 pandemic has also seen a surge of online modes of conducting research work due to obvious reasons. Online surveys though useful, have major lacunas. The majority of these surveys, especially in psychiatry, are open where the study universe is almost unknown, limiting the generalizability of findings. Some journals started publishing research even without proper ethical approval stating the emergency need of the hour. Fast-tracking of ethical approval and peer review means a compromise in many aspects of the scientific publication process. An alarmingly high number of retractions on COVID-19 publications have been reported, including those from very high impact factor journals (Abritis et al., 2020). As per the Retraction Watch, 33 articles related to COVID-19 are retracted to date. Considering that the COVID-19 research is quickly getting media attention, poor-quality studies may get wider dissemination (the most striking example is hydroxychloroquine study and endorsement by President Donald Trump), leading to irrational policymaking (Herper, 2020). On the other hand, the editorial boards and reviewers are more occupied with COVID- 19 related publications with an unintended impact on publishing other relevant public health publications. Almost all the medical journals publish COVID-19 related papers more preferentially, ignoring the other areas of research. Special issues on COVID-19 are also being fast-tracked, meaning the other essential research papers might not find space (the study that might have been considered for publication in an alternate universe without the COVID-19 pandemic). Flooding of academic journals with poorquality papers means that publication of other relevant good quality studies on COVID- 19 would be delayed, potentially prolonging the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the research papers are now routinely uploaded on preprint servers before the peer review process has begun. COVID-19 pandemic has seen a drastic surge in preprints getting published in medical sciences (Kwon, 2020). Without the peer-review process, it is hard to judge the quality of the publication. Thus, the inadvertent use of the preprints for clinical decision-making may occur in the wake of the pandemic. This might be harmful not to just science but also the patients suffering from COVID-19. Thus, there is a definite need to focus more on the publications' quality and not the quantity. The editors, peer reviewers, and authors have an equal role to play in achieving this goal. Academic journals should introspect if they have set a bar too low