Publishing the pandemic: the impact of COVID-19 on science and scientific publishing

Abstract

Health systems and medical service providers faced many challenges during the COVID pandemic. This included the medical publishing field. Many medical journals, especially those in general medicine, respirology and critical care, and infectious disease, were forced to evaluate high numbers of manuscripts, at times exceeding the typical average of daily submissions by a factor of 3–5. This was the challenge faced by the flagship journals of the European Respiratory Society (ERS) and the American Thoracic Society (ATS), which had the goal of publishing useful information, and doing it rapidly, while maintaining scientific quality and integrity. As most society journals rely heavily on volunteer reviewers and non-professional editors, considerable stress was put upon the peer review system. Pre-print publications noted a surge in activity during this period and, not surprisingly, journal Impact Factors became inflated due to highly cited COVID-related papers. These effects were temporary, and a few years after the end of the pandemic, medical publishing is now back to previous levels: sound and effective, but intrinsically vulnerable to larger challenges.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1183/2312508X.10021623

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https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/publications/62265ad7-7214-41ba-92fb-8b24157fcca9