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

Serge P.J.M. Horbach

Next we turn our analysis towards the publication of preprints. As was shown in figure 1 , the number of preprints on Covid-19 related content has seen a sharp increase since the outbreak of the pandemic. In total 2102 preprints were published on seven preprint servers: SSRN Electronic Journal, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv, JMIR Preprints, Research Square, and medRxiv. We note that even though arXiv publications are included in the Dimensions database, they are not included in the 4 April release of the dataset we used, due to technical issues. Out of the 2102 preprints in our dataset, 129 have currently also appeared as journal article. Due to the small number of preprints appearing as journal articles, no statistically relevant conclusions can be drawn about the uptake of preprints in journals. However, analyse the average duration between the publication of the preprint and the corresponding journal article we see a steady increase, ranging from, on average, 137 days in 2017 and just over 200 days in 2020. Currently, we do not see any indication of acceleration of the uptake of preprints in journals since the outbreak of