RESEARCH ARTICLE
Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact in
major medical journals
Kayvan Kousha
and Mike Thelwall
Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, School of Mathematics and Computer Science,
University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, 英国
开放访问
杂志
关键词: Covid-19, medical journals, peer-review durations, publication delay
引文: Kousha, K., & Thelwall, 中号.
(2022). Covid-19 refereeing duration
and impact in major medical journals.
Quantitative Science Studies, 3(1),
1–17. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a
_00176
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00176
Peer Review:
https://publons.com/publon/10.1162
/qss_a_00176
支持信息:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00176
已收到: 8 九月 2021
公认: 1 一月 2022
通讯作者:
Kayvan Kousha
k.kousha@wlv.ac.uk
处理编辑器:
Ludo Waltman
版权: © 2022 Kayvan Kousha and
Mike Thelwall. Published under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
国际的 (抄送 4.0) 执照.
麻省理工学院出版社
抽象的
Two partly conflicting academic pressures from the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic are
the need for faster peer review of Covid-19 health-related research and greater scrutiny of its
发现. This paper investigates whether decreases in peer review durations for Covid-19
articles were universal across 97 major medical journals, as well as Nature, 科学, and Cell.
The results suggest that on average, Covid-19 articles submitted during 2020 were reviewed
1.7–2.1 times faster than non-Covid-19 articles submitted during 2017–2020. 尽管如此,
while the review speed of Covid-19 research was particularly fast during the first 5 月
(1.9–3.4 times faster) of the pandemic ( January–May 2020), this speed advantage was no
longer evident for articles submitted in November–December 2020. Faster peer review was
also associated with higher citation impact for Covid-19 articles in the same journals,
suggesting it did not usually compromise the scholarly impact of important Covid-19 research.
全面的, 然后, it seems that core medical and general journals responded quickly but carefully
to the pandemic, although the situation returned closer to normal within a year.
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1.
介绍
The daily international death tolls from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 和 2021 created an
urgent need for health-related research into treatments, vaccines, and safety precautions, 作为
well as fundamental science to investigate the cell biology of the virus. The social restrictions
and economic disruption subsequently generated spin-off urgent requirements for many other
types of academic research. This has, 反过来, generated the need for faster research than nor-
mal to tackle urgent unexpected problems (Bramstedt, 2020; Kousha & Thelwall, 2020). 为了
例子, 在一月 2020, Wellcome called for fast, transparent, open access academic pub-
lishing to help humanity deal with the pandemic (Wellcome, 2020). Academia apparently
responded quickly, 与约 4% of published research being about the pandemic by mid-
2020, although mostly not addressing its key health priorities (Odone, Galea et al., 2020).
The rapid Covid-19 research production is faced by a bottleneck for publishing speed in the
form of editorial peer review, with the separate stages of editorial review/rejection, reviewing,
and author revisions each often taking over a month, depending on the journal and field
(Huisman & Smits, 2017). The peer review system before Covid-19 was already considered
slow and overburdened by many academics (Huisman & Smits, 2017; 阮, Haddaway
等人。, 2015). 例如, there is evidence that most of the preprints about the Ebola and
Zika outbreaks published later in the peer-reviewed journals were accessible online more than
100 days before their publication (约翰逊, Reich et al., 2018). Peer review delays may be
Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
exacerbated by increased Covid-19 submission rates for some medical journals (Kondziolka,
Couldwell, & Rutka, 2020; almost tripling at JAMA: Bauchner, Fontanarosa, & Golub, 2020).
Many academics have bypassed this stage by publishing medRxiv, bioRxiv, or arXiv preprints
(例如, Aviv-Reuven & Rosenfeld, 2021; Kataoka, Oide et al., 2020; Vlasschaert, Topf, &
Hiremath, 2020), attracting academic and nonacademic audiences. 例如, 关于
25% of all Covid-19-related publications from the first 10 months of the coronavirus pandemic
were deposited in the bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint repositories for medicine and the health
科学, indicating the recognized value of preprints to bypass the peer review process, 给定
the pandemic urgency (弗雷泽, Brierley et al., 2021). Peer review is vital to evaluate academic
发现, 然而, because “rapid publication of clinically actionable information during a
pandemic is important, [但] publishing results that are not valid can do harm” (Bauchner
等人。, 2020, p. 453). This threat has been highlighted by high-profile Covid-19 retractions
(Agoramoorthy, Hsu, & Shieh, 2020; Mann, 2020).
Peer review has evolved over time, becoming standardized in the 20th century (Burnham,
1990), but with processes varying between journals (Tennant & Ross-Hellauer, 2020). 一些
journals, including eLife, have relaxed their peer reviewing standards during the pandemic for
all research by ruling out reviewer requests that would be unreasonable for lockdown-affected
authors, such as long extra experiments (Eisen, Akhmanova et al., 2020). 相比之下, JAMA:
The Journal of the American Medical Association has modified its editorial process for all
papers and has a fast track for key Covid-19 research that is designed to be as rapid as possible
without compromising rigor (Bauchner et al., 2020). The Lancet (Agoramoorthy et al., 2020),
PNAS (Berenbaum, 2020) and probably many other journals also have formal or informal fast-
track processes (例如, Welch, Long et al., 2020). It is not clear whether this translates into falling
标准, 然而. 例如, if a peer review is submitted after one day instead of 3
weeks, is the reviewer likely to have rushed the review rather than prioritizing it and giving
it the same (或者更多) 时间? 直观地, it seems possible that both happen: Reviewers might
spend extra time on a Covid-19 paper because of its higher importance, might forgive its short-
comings (例如, in writing style) on the same basis, or might attempt to complete the review
迅速地, recognizing its urgency, even if they did not have time for an adequate review. If large
high-impact journals are uniquely able to build bespoke rigorous peer review pathways for
Covid-19 research, then this would explain why they initially published the largest share of
它 (Kambakamba, Geoghegan, & Hoti, 2020). A qualitative investigation into open peer review
reports for eLife and the British Medical Journal found similar overall levels of thoroughness,
but reviewers tended to use partly different criteria for Covid-19 research, such as requesting
less extra work, being more constructive, and requesting that limitations are acknowledged
rather than addressed (Horbach, 2021). Comparing Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 research is
complicated by the non-Covid-19 health research having changed its average nature due to
the pandemic; 例如, with fewer randomized controlled trials published in three med-
ical journals (Bian & 林, 2020).
Previous studies have investigated the duration of acceptance or peer review for Covid-19
research using early data from 2020. 然而, assessing Covid-19 research published in 2020
gives biases, as Covid-19 publishing effectively started in early 2020 and restricting data to
papers submitted in 2020 gives biases by excluding submitted papers that have not yet been
published due to long reviewing times. Some studies have nevertheless suggested that Covid-
19 reviewing processes tend to have been shorter, which seems intuitively likely. Covid-19
articles posted to PubMed by June 2020 tended to have a fifth of the time in review compared
to non-Covid papers posted during the same period and in the same journals (Putman,
Ruderman, & Niforatos, 2020) but this comparison is biased because the collection included
Quantitative Science Studies
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
older non-Covid-19 papers (例如, 1,089 articles submitted in 2017) than possible for Covid-19.
A similarly large-scale study investigated PubMed Covid-19 records from 30 January to 23
四月 2020, finding them to be published twice as quickly as comparator sets of articles, 和
a median 6 days taken to accept Covid-19 papers (Palayew, Norgaard et al., 2020; see also
Kambakamba et al., 2020). This comparison was similarly biased in favor of Covid-19 pub-
lishing speed. An investigation of 259 Covid-19 and 270 non-Covid-19 articles in 14 健康
and general journals before and during the Covid-19 pandemic found that publication delays
for Covid-19 research had almost halved (51%) due to faster peer review, but non-Covid-19
articles had no change in publishing speed (Horbach, 2020). An investigation pointed out that
some Covid-19 articles are published on the day submitted to a journal (orthopedics-related),
suggesting special treatment (Khalifa & Ahmed, 2021). A study using the full text records from
the Dimensions database compared average days between submission and accepted dates of
academic and news articles about infectious diseases (例如, influenza, pneumonia, or vaccine),
finding that weekly review durations of publications during January to July 2020 had reduced
by about 30% (40 天) compared with the same period in 2019 和 2018 (Hook, Porter et al.,
2021). Another investigation compared average acceptance durations of Covid-19 articles
从 11 medical journals published between January to June of 2020 with average acceptance
durations of all non-Covid articles published during 2016–2019, finding that Covid-19-related
publications were accepted almost five times faster (19.3 与. 91.3 天, 分别) (Aviv-
Reuven & Rosenfeld, 2021). 然而, the acceptance durations were defined as “the period
between the date received and the date accepted or the date online for a paper, whichever is
earlier.” This may introduce bias because of mixing review and publication durations. 尽管
the papers reviewed above, no study has investigated a large set of major journals for the
influence of Covid-19 on peer review on a per-journal basis. This is important because high-
impact journals may generate bespoke pathways, whereas others may not have the resources
为了这. 此外, most previous studies of peer review speed have used early Covid-19
publication data for small sets of full text articles and were not able to control for Covid-19
studies being young at the time. 而且, it is not clear whether the initially apparently fast
peer review for Covid-19 research has continued to operate over time ( January–December
2020). 作为回应, this article uses a semiautomatic method to assess peer review speed for
health-related Covid-19 journals, on a per journal basis, and updating previous studies
(大多) from early 2020. It is driven by the following research questions.
(西德:129) RQ1: Is Covid-19 research in high-impact medical relevant journals published more
quickly than non-Covid-19 research during (2020) and before the pandemic (2017–
2019)? Are there significant differences between journals?
(西德:129) RQ2: Does faster-reviewed Covid-19 research generate more citation impact than
slower-reviewed Covid-19 research in high-impact relevant journals?
2. 方法
To compare the duration of review processes for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles submit-
ted during and before the coronavirus pandemic ( 一月 2017 to December 2020), 这
received-accepted dates of 104,851 PubMed indexed articles from 100 mostly medical jour-
nals with the highest impact factors were automatically extracted (see Table S1 in the Supple-
mentary material). PubMed seems to have more coverage of current biomedical research than
Scopus and Web of Science, making a useful source for addressing the research questions
(例如, Falagas, Pitsouni et al., 2008; Tober, 2011). Although high citation impact is not the same
as high quality and impact factors vary greatly between fields, impact factors are a useful quan-
titative indicator to generate a set of journals that are likely to be much more influential than
Quantitative Science Studies
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
average for the pandemic. The average review durations (天) of Covid-19 and non-Covid-19
articles were compared across individual journals with confidence intervals at the 95% 等级
to help assess if differences between review processes are statistically significant. 这里, 这
“review process” includes all stages between initial submission and formal acceptance of arti-
克莱斯, including refereeing, author revisions, and any other editorial steps. Correlations between
review durations and Scopus citations to Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles were calculated
to examine if articles with faster reviews had more citations. Scopus citations were used
because there is evidence that Scopus has wider coverage and indexes Covid-19 publications
more quickly compared to the Web of Science (da Silva, Tsigaris, & Erfanmanesh, 2021;
Kousha & Thelwall, 2020). The details of this are given below.
2.1. Data Set
Clarivate Journal Citation Reports ( JCR) 2019 was used to identify medical journals and
考研 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) was queried to extract the bibliographic infor-
mation and the publication history of their articles (received and accepted dates, 如果有的话) 从
一月 2016 to June 2021.
The main JCR journal ranking list was manually checked to select relevant medical journals
with the highest impact factors. We did not select journals based on JCR subcategories (例如,
药品, General & Internal) because some high-impact medical journals with many Covid-
19 relevant publications were indexed in other JCR categories. 例如, The Lancet Respi-
ratory Medicine ( JCR rank: 57) was indexed in “Respiratory System,” The Lancet Infectious
Diseases ( JCR rank: 59) in “Infectious Diseases,” Immunity (65) in “Immunology,” and Gut
( JCR rank: 88) in “Gastroenterology & Hepatology.” Moreover, initial checking showed that
three high-impact multidisciplinary and cell biology journals, 自然, 科学, and Cell, 哪个
were not indexed in any medical -related JCR categories, had published many Covid-19 arti-
克莱斯. Although this is a multidisciplinary set of journals of different types—some general, 一些
specialist—and with different Impact Factors, the analyses focus on comparisons between the
duration of review processes for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles within journals rather
than comparisons between journals.
For each initially selected journal, searches were performed in PubMed to check if they had
articles with received and accepted dates in PubMed during January 2017 to June 2021. 作为一个
例子, the following PubMed query was used to download articles published in the Lancet
between January 2017 and June 2021:
(“Lancet (伦敦, England)”[杂志]) AND ((“2017/01/01″[Date – Publication] : “2021/06/
30″[Date – Publication])).
PubMed provides “received for review” and “accepted for publication” dates in the Publi-
cation History Status (PHST) 场地 (例如, “PHST – 2020/06/01 [received] and “PHST – 2020/07/
15 [accepted]”). Many journals do not provide article publication histories or only provide
either submission or acceptance dates. 例如, The New England Journal of Medicine
( JCR rank 2) does not provide publication histories and The Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
( JCR rank 4) only provides acceptance dates1. To identify which journal provides both dates
for articles, we checked the PubMed results for all medical journals with the highest impact
因素. Although some journals provided submission and acceptance dates, they had very few
1 The required submission and acceptance dates were not identified for articles published in Nature Reviews
and JAMA journals such as Nature Reviews Immunology and JAMA Internal Medicine.
Quantitative Science Studies
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
published standard articles (excluding editorials, standard reviews, 笔记, letter, and other non-
article contributions). 然而, systematic reviews and meta-analysis were not excluded
because they present results by analyzing and combining data from relevant investigations
(例如, Diagnostic performance of different sampling approaches for SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR test-
英: a systematic review and meta-analysis). 例如, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians
( JCR rank 1) 和 75 articles during 2017–June 2021 had only one Covid-19-relevant article at
the time of data collection. To have meaningful statistical evidence, only journals with 13 或者
more Covid-19 articles were selected for analysis.
To automatically extract publication history histories of articles from PubMed outputs, A
program was written and added to the free Webometric Analyst software (https://lexiurl.wlv
.ac.uk: Services menu, “MeSH and PubMed/Convert PubMed plain text format to tab-
delimited”). The program extracts bibliographic information as well as received, 修改,
and accepted dates of articles (如果有的话) from PubMed format saved files in PubMed format.
The differences between submission and acceptance dates were calculated using the DATEDIF
function in Excel. Covid-19 relevant articles submitted during 2020 were identified through
relevant Covid-19 terms in their titles, abstracts or keywords (“Covid-19” 或者 “Covid” 或者 “coro-
navirus” 或者 “corona virus OR “2019-nCoV” 或者 “SARS-CoV-2”).
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2.2. Data Cleaning
Although the PubMed filter option was used to limit the search results to “Journal Articles,”
manual checking showed that some PubMed results were not articles. These are important
to exclude because peer review might be quicker for editorial material or slower for review
文件. To have a more uniform data set for statistical analysis, the DOIs of the extracted
PubMed publications were searched and matched against both Scopus and the Web of Sci-
恩斯 ( WoS) to get additional type classifications, and any identified as nonarticles in either
被排除在外. 而且, to minimize the duration advantage of Covid-19 articles, the sub-
mission years of articles were used instead of publication years for analysis to have no article
older than a year. This reduces bias because the submission dates of all Covid-19 articles were
after January 2020 (during the pandemic), but many non-Covid-19 articles published in 2020
were submitted in 2019. 因此, comparisons between the speed of review processes during
the pandemic (2020) could be unfair. 例如, the non-Covid-19 article “Integrin α6 medi-
ates the drug resistance of acute lymphoblastic B-cell leukemia” was submitted to the journal
Blood on 20 行进 2019 (almost 9 months before the pandemic) and published on 27 行进
2020, and so would automatically have a longer review time than all Covid-19 articles pub-
lished on the same date. To obtain Scopus citations, queries were automatically generated to
combine DOIs of PubMed data and searched via the Scopus Advanced Search interface (例如,
DOI(“10.1128/jvi.02422-20”) OR…).
总之, the final data set mainly consisted of 97 medical journals with the highest
impact factors that also published submission and acceptance dates in PubMed and at least
13 Covid-19 articles. It also contained two leading multidisciplinary journals (Science and
自然) and one cell biology journal (细胞 ), all of which had published many Covid-19
出版物. 为了方便, this set will be described as 100 medical high-impact rele-
vant journals.
A shared data set provides bibliographic information, submission and acceptance dates,
and Scopus citations of 104,851 PubMed indexed articles from 100 medical journals used
in this study (https://figshare.com/s/fac222ae70ce013128cd).
Quantitative Science Studies
5
Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
2.3. 分析
Geometric means were used to compare the average peer review durations for Covid-19 and
non-Covid-19 articles published by year and by journal. The geometric mean was used as an
appropriate central tendency measure for highly skewed data and confidence intervals were
calculated at the 95% level to assess if differences between the average review processes for
Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles were statistically significant in each journal.
Spearman correlation tests were used to assess the strength of association between the
review durations and Scopus citation counts for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles. 为了
实例, negative Spearman correlations between peer review durations and Scopus citations
would suggest that faster-published articles tend to generate more citation impact.
3. 结果
3.1. Review Process Duration for Covid-19 and Non-Covid-19 Articles
平均而言, Covid-19 articles submitted to the 100 selected medical-relevant journals during
the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 were reviewed almost 1.7 times faster than non-Covid arti-
cles submitted to the same journals in 2020. 有一个 36 days shorter average review pro-
过程 (49 和 85 天, 分别). The reviewing process speed of Covid-19 research also
曾是 2.0 到 2.1 times faster than non-Covid-19 research before the pandemic submitted to the
same medical journals during 2017–2019. Because the confidence intervals do not overlap,
the difference between Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 article review durations is statistically sig-
nificant at the 95% 等级 (数字 1).
The fastest Covid-19 review processes were for articles submitted during March and April
2020 (3.4 和 2.7 times faster). 然而, the fast-reviewing of Covid-19 research decreased over
the following months and review durations became similar to those for non-Covid-19 research
during November and December 2020 (数字 2). This suggests that, 一般, the peer review
system in the medical journals had responded appropriately to prevent publication delays for
Covid-19 research during the first months of coronavirus pandemic. 例如, 的 185
Covid-19 articles that had been reviewed within 5 days or less, 83% (153 文章) were submitted
to the journals analyzed during the first 6 months of pandemic ( January to June, 2020).
数字 1. Average (geometric mean) days of review processes and 95% confidence intervals for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles sub-
mitted during (2020) and before (2017–2019) the coronavirus pandemic to 100 medical journals with high impact factors (n = 104,851).
Quantitative Science Studies
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
数字 2. Average days of review processes for Covid-19 articles (n = 4,038) and non-Covid-19 articles (n = 26,104) submitted to 100 medical
journals with high impact factors between January and December 2020.
3.2. Review Process Duration for Covid-19 and Non-Covid-19 Articles by Journal
The overall Covid-19 reviewing process speed increase described above could be universal
across journals or restricted to a small number of them. To check for this, 数字 3 shows the
average (geometric mean) review duration for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles submitted
到 50 journals in the set analyzed with the highest JCR impact factors during and before the
pandemic, 在 2019 和 2020 separately. Figure S1 in the Supplementary material gives a sim-
ilar evaluation for the next 51–100 journals. 全面的, the average review durations for Covid-
19 articles were shorter than for non-Covid-19 articles either submitted in 2019 或者 2020 across
all journals (except Journal of Virology; see discussion) and this difference was statistically sig-
nificant for 80% of the journals (80 journals out of 100) 在 95% 等级. 人物 3 and S1 in
the Supplementary material also show that the average review durations for non-Covid-19 arti-
cles submitted during pandemic in 2020 were statistically shorter than non-Covid-19 articles
before the pandemic in 2019 为了 35% of journals, whereas only 2% journals had shorter
review processes for 2019 non-Covid-19 articles compared with 2020 non-Covid-19 articles.
平均而言, the Covid-19 article review durations are shorter by 49% (47 天) 和 53%
(55 天) compared with non-Covid-19 articles submitted during 2020 和 2019, 分别.
This average reduction in review duration for Covid-19 research is more substantial in some
journals, such as Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, 与约 91% 和 92%, and Journal of Infec-
的, 和 90% 和 89%, compared with non-Covid-19 articles submitted during and before
the pandemic in 2020 和 2019, 分别 (桌子 1). The three journals with the highest
impact factors, The Lancet (62% 和 66%), 科学 (62% 和 69%), and Nature (57% 和
65%), had also shortened their review processes for Covid-19 articles significantly compared
with non-Covid-19 articles submitted during and before the pandemic (2020–2019, 重新指定-
主动地), perhaps to avoid publication delays for coronavirus scientific results. 桌子 1 报告
这 35 journals with the highest relative decrease of review processes of Covid-19 articles
compared with non-Covid-19 articles published during 2020–2021.
To estimate whether the publication processes of journals could influence the results, 这
average durations between submission to a journal and addition to PubMed were calculated,
Quantitative Science Studies
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数字 3. Average (geometric mean) days of review processes and 95% confidence intervals for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles published
在 50 medical related journals with the high impact factors. (See also Figure S1 in the supplementary material for results from journals 51–100.)
finding that the publication processes for Covid-19 articles were shorter than for non-Covid-19
articles in both 2019 或者 2020 for all journals. This difference was statistically significant for
84% of the journals (84 journals out of 100) 在 95% 等级 (See Figures S3 and S4 in the
Supplementary material). PubMed addition dates were used as the only available data relevant
to publication dates in PubMed and hence the results should be cautiously interpreted here.
3.3. Correlations Between Review Processes Duration and Research Impact
Spearman correlation tests were calculated separately for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles
submitted to each of the 100 journals during 2019–2020 to assess whether shorter review pro-
cesses for Covid-19 research are an indicator of likely future citation impact. 人物 4 and S2
in the Supplementary material show that, 一般来说, there were negative correlations between
Quantitative Science Studies
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
这 35 journals with the highest average review processes shortening for Covid-19 articles compared with non-Covid-19 articles
桌子 1.
submitted during (2020) and before (2019) the coronavirus pandemic. Journals are ranked based on review process duration reductions in 2020
杂志 ( JCR rank)
Gastrointest Endosc (618)
J Infection (1256)
Brain Behav Immun (662)
Brit J Surg (903)
J Am Geriatr Soc (1721)
Eur J Cancer (549)
Travel Med Infect Dis (1426)
Gut (88)
Pediat Allerg Imm (1345)
Neurology (393)
Can J Cardiol (1063)
Gastroenterology (109)
Nat Med (23)
Eur J Epidemiol (570)
Brit J Haematol (950)
细胞 (21)
J Am Soc Nephrol (357)
Diabetes Care (136)
Diabetes Res Clin Pr (1672)
Clin Gastroenterol H (409)
Sci Immunol (194)
Ann Rheum Dis (134)
Lancet (5)
科学 (15)
Med J Australia (773)
Pharmacol Res (832)
Am J Obstet Gynecol (688)
Allergy (397)
Lancet Public Health (129)
Relative percentage (天) of average decrease in review process durations
Between Covid-19 and
Between Covid-19 and
non-Covid-19 articles (2020)
non-Covid-19 articles (2019)
90.7% (75)
92.5% (95)
89.3% (81)
87.4% (91)
85.8% (61)
79.5% (66)
79.6% (48)
69.1% (92)
81.9% (112)
75.8% (55)
76.4% (115)
78.1% (59)
80.3% (125)
71% (124)
73% (105)
72.4% (48)
74.1% (158)
74.4% (114)
72.9% (97)
60.8% (56)
79.5% (49)
69.6% (126)
63.3% (59)
65.6% (35)
68.6% (118)
62.5% (79)
74% (77)
63.8% (61)
71.2% (78)
52.6% (47)
89.6% (85)
86.7% (86)
82.5% (47)
80.4% (70)
79.9% (49)
77.1% (138)
76.8% (82)
74.4% (51)
74.3% (103)
71.8% (42)
71.6% (77)
69.6% (116)
69.3% (88)
68.8% (40)
68.6% (120)
67.3% (81)
66.2% (70)
65.7% (69)
63.7% (22)
63.1% (94)
62.5% (57)
62.3% (31)
62.3% (89)
62.1% (77)
61.9% (44)
61.5% (55)
60.7% (49)
58.8% (61)
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杂志 ( JCR rank)
Blood (103)
Lancet Infect Dis (59)
Clin Res Cardiol (1047)
自然 (14)
Diabetes Obes Metab (829)
Mayo Clin Proc (610)
桌子 1.
(continued )
Relative percentage (天) of average decrease in review process durations
Between Covid-19 and
Between Covid-19 and
non-Covid-19 articles (2020)
non-Covid-19 articles (2019)
57.4% (61)
65.1% (84)
72.8% (101)
62% (58)
65.3% (141)
58.8% (46)
60.7% (55)
57.1% (50)
57% (47)
56.7% (98)
56.4% (41)
56.3% (46)
the duration of review processes and Scopus citations to articles for most high-impact journals.
然而, the magnitudes of the correlations between citation counts and the duration of
review processes of Covid-19 articles are much higher than for non-Covid-19 articles submit-
ted to the journals either during or before the pandemic.
The Spearman’s coefficients for 24% of the journals (24 在......之外 100) were strongly negative
(more than −0.70) 并为 36% moderately negative (−0.50 to −0.70) for Covid-19 articles.
因此, the results suggest that there was a high to medium degree of association between
reviewing speed for Covid-19 research and higher citation impact for 60% of the medical jour-
nals. 尽管如此, many important medical journals do not provide the publication history of
文章 (例如, The New England Journal of Medicine) and the results for these journals might be
不同的. Presumably, the importance of the most critical Covid-19 research was clear to the
authors, 编辑, and reviewers, who sped up the entire process in response. These importance
judgments might take into account factors such as whether the research was likely to lead to
effective safety measures, treatments, or vaccines for humans rather than being of indirect
value for the pandemic. The correlation may have been influenced by any tendency for
faster-reviewed papers to also be available simultaneously as preprints, giving them more time
to attract citations. It is not clear whether this is a factor, 然而. The difference between
journals in correlation magnitudes might be affected by some journals attracting a higher share
of papers from early in the pandemic, when they would have more time to attract citations and
would therefore generate a higher correlation, other factors being equal. The stronger corre-
lations for Covid-19 than for non-Covid-19 for journals that are not gold open access may be
partly due to a higher proportion of the Covid-19 papers being open access, generating more
citations and thus making the correlation test statistically more powerful.
相比之下, correlations between review duration and Scopus citation counts for non-
Covid-19 research submitted during 2019–2020 were in most cases insignificant and weak
(少于 0.30) 仅有的 8% 和 3% of the journals had moderate negative correlations, 重新指定-
主动地. 例如, the three Covid-19 articles with the fastest review process (1, 2, 和 3 天)
从 10 highest impact journals were “Feasibility of controlling COVID-19 outbreaks by
isolation of cases and contacts” (Lancet Global Health), “Clinical features of patients infected
和 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China” (The Lancet), and “Nowcasting and forecast-
ing the potential domestic and international spread of the 2019-nCoV outbreak originating in
Wuhan, 中国: a modelling study” (The Lancet), attracting 775, 14,854 和 1,478 Scopus cita-
tions as of June 2021. 因此, faster reviewing processes for more cited articles are a feature of
Covid-19 publishing, although it is not clear the same is true in general or for other topics.
Quantitative Science Studies
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数字 4. Spearman correlations between the duration of peer review processes and Scopus citation counts for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19
articles published in 50 medical-related journals with high impact factors. (See also Figure S2 in the Supplementary material for results from
journals 51–100.)
3.4. Further Analysis of Topics and Types of the Fastest Published Covid-19 Research
To assess the main topics and types of coronavirus research with the shortest review processes,
49 Covid-19 articles from the 30 journals from the set analyzed here with the highest impact
factors and with quick (最多 10 天) review processes were manually checked (Table S2 in
the Supplementary material).
The first author read the articles to broadly classify the topics and types of these articles.
Three general topics were used to classify the broad subject of articles:
(西德:129) Covid-19 infection, transmission, or control: Clinical research about the transmission of
Covid-19 infection such as characteristics of person-to-person Covid-19 transmission,
symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and hospitalization.
Quantitative Science Studies
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
(西德:129) Covid-19 genomic structures: Laboratory research about coronavirus genome structure,
顺序, 复制, or mutation.
(西德:129) Covid-19 vaccine: Research about the safety, efficacy, and immunogenicity of Covid-19
vaccines.
Most Covid-19 articles with the fastest review process were about infection, transmission,
or control (81.6%), genomic structures (10.2%), and vaccines (8.2%). A clear majority (59.2%)
of Covid-19 articles were clinical, including clinical trials, clinical observations, or clinical
case reports (例如, clinical trials for vaccine safety and effectiveness), 18.4% were practice
guidelines (例如, guidance for management of coronavirus), 10.2% were epidemiological
造型 (例如, forecasting the spread of Covid-19), 8.2% were laboratory research (例如, struc-
ture of the coronavirus spike), 和 4.1% were surveys (例如, symptoms among positive cases).
直观地, all these articles seem to be of high and universal value in addressing the pan-
demic, suggesting that the fast review processes were appropriate and necessary for them
(see also Table S2 in the Supplementary material).
4. 讨论
This study has some methodological limitations. 第一的, some important Covid-19 research is
published in journals not analyzed here, including The New England Journal of Medicine
( JCR 2019 rank 2) and JAMA ( JCR rank 11), and the results may differ for the excluded journals
if they had provided publication histories for their articles. As the patterns found here are uni-
versal or near-universal across journals, they seem likely to apply to all major medical journals,
but may not apply to minor medical journals or other fields. For the citation counts, 结果
do not use 2-year citation windows to give articles submitted during 2020 enough time to be
cited by other researchers and hence should be interpreted cautiously, especially for non-
Covid-19 articles submitted during 2020. It is therefore possible that some of the patterns found
are due to differences over time in the impact of Covid-19 research. This is possible because
early papers may have been the most impactful as a side-effect of the rapidly expanding Covid-
19 文学 (because moderately early Covid-19 papers would have few Covid-19 papers to
choose from to cite). 而且, the editorial policy of publishers could have an impact on
reviewing and publishing Covid-19 research by prioritizing the fast review and publication
of Covid-19-related research. 例如, a group of academic publishers and organizations
have joined an initiative to ensure that Covid-19 research is peer-reviewed and published as
quickly as possible (OASPA, 2021). Future research could investigate the impact of reviewing
policy of publishers on rapid reviewing of coronavirus research in more detail.
An important factor that this study does not take into account and has no data about is the
possibility that some articles had fast review processes because they had been submitted to
one journal, then rejected but cascaded with reviews to another journal from the same pub-
lisher. If the cascade was to a lower Impact Factor journal, then this might result in fast review
(or almost immediate acceptance based on the reviews) and a relatively highly cited article for
the second journal (because it had been seriously considered by the higher impact journal).
These two factors combined would contribute to a negative correlation between publishing
speed and citations for the second journal, other factors being equal.
而且, the analysis of the 49 Covid-19 articles with the fastest review processes (看
Table S2 in the Supplementary material) showed that three were published as a “Brief Commu-
nication” or “Viewpoint” rather than an “Article,” despite being recorded as articles in PubMed,
Scopus, and WoS. There is no universally agreed definition of articles that could be used to
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
decide whether these classifications were correct. 因此, there might be some nonarticle
Covid-19 publications in the main data set with shorter review processes. We could not find
any practical method to systematically identify these cases for a large-scale study, 然而, 和
presumably the same applies to the non-Covid-19 articles in the comparator sets.
The results confirm prior findings that Covid-19 research is published more rapidly
(Horbach, 2020; Palayew et al., 2020), strengthening them by considering a much larger set
of journals, a longer period, and methods that greatly reduce bias in the comparisons. 这
results also show, 首次, that faster-published Covid-19 articles tend to generate
higher citation impact, apparently breaking the normal scientific pattern in this regard.
A further investigation was made to understand the reason for the exceptional result from
Journal of Virology with slightly shorter review processes for 2019 和 2020 non-Covid-19
articles compared with 2020 Covid-19 (albeit statistically not significant). In many cases the
term “coronavirus” was used in the Covid-19 data set (n = 96) for other non-Covid-19 infection
diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), Severe acute
respiratory syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV ), and avian coronaviruses. 例如,
although the articles “Coronavirus Endoribonuclease and Deubiquitinating Interferon Antago-
nists Differentially Modulate the Host Response during Replication in Macrophages” and “Evo-
lutionary Arms Race between Virus and Host Drives Genetic Diversity in Bat Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome-Related Coronavirus Spike Genes” had the term “coronavirus” in their
titles and were submitted during the pandemic (2020), they were not related to Covid-19. 我们
identified these cases after manual checks of the papers (n = 64) and moved them to the 2020
non-Covid data set to assess if this had an impact on the results. 再次, although the average
review processes for 2019 和 2020 non-Covid-19 articles (38.9 和 37.9) were slightly
shorter than for 2020 Covid-19 articles (39.7), this difference was not statistically significant.
因此, it seems that the review procedure had about the same speed for Covid-19 and non-
Covid-19 research before and during the pandemic for this journal.
The three Covid-19 articles with the longest review processes for this journal were, “LY6E
Restricts Entry of Human Coronaviruses, Including Currently Pandemic SARS-CoV-2” (97 天),
“HTCC as a Polymeric Inhibitor of SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV” (95 天), and “The Enzy-
matic Activity of the nsp14 Exoribonuclease Is Critical for Replication of MERS-CoV and
SARS-CoV-2” (82 天). These relatively short times suggests that the journal has fast review
processes for all articles. As all three papers covered multiple coronaviruses, it is possible that
they were adapted to include Covid-19 during the review process, or perhaps during the final
stages of preparation, so the reviewers might have identified related procedural issues (这是
pure speculation). If this occurred often for the Journal of Virology then it would explain the
lack of shorter review processes for Covid-19 articles in the journal.
4.1.
Impact of Rapid Reviewing on Health Policy
An additional local miniexploration was conducted to test whether quickly reviewed Covid-
19 research might influence policy. To assess whether faster reviewed coronavirus research
could impact Covid-19 vaccination policy-making in the UK, 26 references from the Joint
Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation ( JCVI) report on priority groups for Covid-19
vaccination2 were manually checked for the durations of their review processes. 从这些,
2 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/priority-groups-for-coronavirus-covid-19-vaccination-advice
-from-the-jcvi-30-december-2020/joint-committee-on-vaccination-and-immunisation-advice-on-priority
-groups-for-covid-19-vaccination-30-december-2020.
Quantitative Science Studies
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
eight medical journal articles provided submission and acceptance dates. The median number
of days of review processes for the identified references cited in the JCVI report is 11 days for
journals providing publication histories for their articles (桌子 2), which is very fast compared
with the overall duration of Covid-19 articles in this study (49 天; 见图 1). 那个报告
also cited four preprint articles in medRxiv (a preprint service for the medicine and health
科学), bypassing peer review safeguards. 因此, it seems that the fast reviewing of articles
by journals and disseminating coronavirus research via preprint platforms such as medRxiv
and bioRxiv (see Fraser et al., 2021) found here could have had a significant impact on
Covid-19 vaccine policy-making. 然而, more research on other Covid-19 reports and
government advice in other countries (例如, European Union or United States) is needed to
investigate this further.
4.2. Correlation Between Faster-Reviewed Covid-19 Research and their Citation Impact
The findings show that faster-published coronavirus research tends to have higher citation
impact (数字 4). This seems likely to occur primarily because authors, 编辑, 和/或
reviewers recognize the time sensitivity of the pandemic and try to ensure fast reviewing
and revisions for articles that are potentially important. Although there are some examples
of high-profile retractions for apparently hastily published Covid-19 research, the results sug-
gest that the peer-review process is not compromised by publishing a substantial number of
贫穷的, uncitable studies. To support this discussion, 桌子 3 shows that 10 在......之外 15 Covid-19
articles with the most Scopus citations in the study had been reviewed within 9 days or less.
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桌子 2. Duration of review processes for references cited in a JCVI Report on Covid-19 vaccination
Article title
SARS-CoV-2 infection, clinical features and outcome of COVID-19 in
杂志 ( JCR rank)
J Infection (1,256)
United Kingdom nursing homes.
Safety and immunogenicity of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine against
Lancet (5)
SARS-CoV-2: a preliminary report of a phase ½, single-blind,
randomised controlled trial.
年
2020
2020
Increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection in staff working across different
care homes: enhanced CoVID-19 outbreak investigations in London
care Homes.
Safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AZD1222)
against SARS-CoV-2: an interim analysis of four randomised
controlled trials in Brazil, 南非, 和英国.
J Infection (1,256)
2020
Lancet (5)
2021
Safety and immunogenicity of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine administered
Lancet (5)
2020
in a prime-boost regimen in young and old adults (COV002):
a single-blind, randomised, controlled, phase 2/3 审判.
Phase I/II study of COVID-19 RNA vaccine BNT162b1 in adults.
自然 (14)
Factors associated with COVID-19-related death using OpenSAFELY.
自然 (14)
ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine prevents SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia in
自然 (14)
2020
2020
2021
rhesus macaques.
Median
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Duration of
review in day
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
桌子 3.
Fifteen Covid-19 articles with the most Scopus citations and 23 or less days of review processes (as of June 2021), grouped by journal
杂志 ( JCR rank)
Lancet (5)
标题 (Publication year)
Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 小说
coronavirus in Wuhan, 中国 (2020)
Lancet (5)
Lancet (5)
Clinical course and risk factors for mortality of adult inpatients with
COVID-19 in Wuhan, 中国: a retrospective cohort study (2020)
Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 99 cases of 2019 小说
coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan, 中国: a descriptive study (2020)
Lancet (5)
Genomic characterization and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus:
implications for virus origins and receptor binding (2020)
Lancet (5)
A familial cluster of pneumonia associated with the 2019 小说
Lancet (5)
Lancet (5)
coronavirus indicating person-to-person transmission: a study of a
family cluster (2020)
Clinical characteristics and intrauterine vertical transmission potential
of COVID-19 infection in nine pregnant women: a retrospective
review of medical records (2020)
Nowcasting and forecasting the potential domestic and international
spread of the 2019-nCoV outbreak originating in Wuhan, 中国:
a modelling study (2020)
Lancet Resp Med (57)
Clinical course and outcomes of critically ill patients with SARS-CoV-2
pneumonia in Wuhan, 中国: a single-centered, retrospective,
observational study (2020)
Lancet Infect Dis (59)
Radiological findings from 81 patients with COVID-19 pneumonia in
Wuhan, 中国: a descriptive study (2020)
自然 (14)
A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable
bat origin (2020)
自然 (14)
A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease in
中国 (2020)
自然 (14)
细胞 (21)
Virological assessment of hospitalized patients with COVID-2019 (2020)
SARS-CoV-2 Cell Entry Depends on ACE2 and TMPRSS2 and Is Blocked
by a Clinically Proven Protease Inhibitor (2020)
细胞 (21)
Structure, Function, and Antigenicity of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike
Glycoprotein (2020)
J Virol (1476)
Receptor recognition by the novel coronavirus from Wuhan: An analysis
based on decade-long structural studies of SARS coronavirus (2020)
Duration of
review process
2
Scopus
citations
14,854
14
5
5
7
4
3
4
12
9
21
23
19
7
6
8,351
7,189
3,944
3,406
1,480
1,478
3,380
1,390
6,180
2,879
2,002
4,838
2,166
1,572
例如, the article “Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in
Wuhan, China” and “Nowcasting and forecasting the potential domestic and international
spread of the 2019-nCoV outbreak originating in Wuhan, 中国: a modelling study” had the
shortest review processes (2 和 3 天) and received 14,854 和 1,478 Scopus citations,
分别 (as of June 2021). Presumably these or other articles analyzed here had fast
reviewing because of the fast-track submission services provided by some journals to acceler-
ate the review procedure. 例如, The Lancet has a fast-track publication service for
Quantitative Science Studies
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Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact
randomized controlled trials and original research of major health importance, aiming “to peer
review and publish papers within four weeks of submission”3.
5. 结论
平均而言, Covid-19 research papers were reviewed almost 1.7 到 2.1 times faster than non-
Covid-19 papers during and before the coronavirus pandemic (例如, 49 days compared with 85
和 105 days in 2019 和 2020, 分别). 然而, there were some differences between
journals. The three journals with highest impact factors, The Lancet, 自然, and Science, 还
reduced their review processes for Covid-19 articles by 57%–62% compared with non-Covid-
19 articles submitted during the pandemic in 2020. This confirms a widespread fast academic
response to Covid-19 in the form of apparently universally supporting faster publishing for
relevant research. This is a welcome conclusion in terms of the health of academia and its
contribution to societal challenges. 进一步来说, given that academic journals must be
cautious and conservative to maintain standards, it is reassuring to know that health journals
are able to respond effectively and quickly when necessary.
Faster-reviewed Covid-19 research had more Scopus citations across all major Covid-19-
related journals and correlations were medium–high negative (more than −0.50) for most jour-
nals (60%). 相比之下, in most cases the corresponding correlation was insignificant and small
(少于 0.30) for non-Covid-19 research submitted during 2019–2020. This suggests that
faster reviewing for articles that go on to be more cited is a distinctive feature of Covid-19
出版. This again proposes that the academic publishing system has responded well to
the need for publishing speed to ensure that the most relevant Covid-19 research (assuming
that citations are an indicator of this) can be properly assessed and disseminated quickly
enough to help with the pandemic.
作者贡献
Kayvan Kousha: 概念化, 数据管理, Management activities, 调查,
方法, Writing—original draft. Mike Thelwall: 软件, Writing—review & 编辑.
COMPETING INTERESTS
The authors have no competing interests.
资金信息
The authors did not receive any funding for this research.
DATA AVAILABILITY
The shared database provides bibliographic information, publication history, and Scopus
citations of 104,851 PubMed indexed articles from 100 medical relevant journals with high
impact factors collected on June 30, 2021 (https://figshare.com/s/fac222ae70ce013128cd).
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