Pandemic publishing: Medical journals strongly speed up their publication process for COVID-19

  1. Serge P. J. M. Horbach

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Abstract

In times of public crises, including the current COVID-19 pandemic, rapid dissemination of relevant scientific knowledge is of paramount importance. The duration of scholarly journals’ publication process is one of the main factors that may hinder quick delivery of new information. Following initiatives of medical journals to accelerate their publication process, this study assesses whether medical journals have managed to speed up their publication process for coronavirus-related articles. It studies the duration of 14 medical journals’ publication processes both during and prior to the current pandemic. Assessing 669 articles, the study concludes that medical journals have indeed strongly accelerated their publication process for coronavirus-related articles since the outbreak of the pandemic: The time between submission and publication has decreased on average by 49%. The largest decrease in number of days between submission and publication of articles was due to a decrease in time required for peer review. For articles not related to COVID-19, no acceleration of the publication process is found. While the acceleration of the publication process is laudable from the perspective of quick information dissemination, it also may raise concerns relating to the quality of the peer review process and of the resulting publications.

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  1. Version published to 10.1162/qss_a_00076
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.18.045963: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    This study potentially suffers from various limitations in its analysis. First, it could only analyse those journal articles that have been published. This particularly implies that it was unable to assess the review process’ duration for rejected articles. Neither could it analyse articles that are currently still under review. Second, the analysis does not include article type as a feature of analysis. Some article types, including letters to the editor, perspectives or commentaries, might undergo a different kind of peer review – they might for instance only be reviewed by the editor, rather than by external reviewers. A potential difference in distribution of pre- and post-crisis articles over the various article types might explain some of the variation in the publication process’ duration. Third, our analyses focus on journals publishing relatively many Covid-19 related articles. Due to a lack of sufficient articles in other, potentially smaller journals, we were not able to analyse those journals. As larger journals may more easily attract reviewers and have more resources, and hence more capacity to shift resources, to execute the editorial stage of publication, the resulting decrease in publication time might be less strong in smaller journals. At a later stage, when more Covid-19 related papers appear in other journals, future research could verify this potential difference. Last, it should be noted that some of the journal articles assigned to our control group con...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No funding statement was detected.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.18.045963v1 on bioRxiv