The Unprecedented Growth of COVID-19 Publications and the Academic Medical Librarian

Objectives: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic an unprecedented amount of biomedical literature citations were added to PubMed. This bibliometric study will focus on the types of COVID-19 publications on PubMed such as clinical trials, meta analyses, systematic reviews, and randomized controlled trials and compare them to biomedical publications of all subject areas. Importantly this study will focus on preprint publications from the PubMed Central preprint pilot. Retraction rates have gone up in recent years therefore this study will show the rate of retraction of PubMed publications over the last 10 years. Additionally, it will compare the retraction rate for all PubMed publications to the retraction rate of COVID-19 publications. Lastly, this study will show the number of COVID-19 citations by country/territory for 30 top publishing countries/territories.Methods: PubMed was searched in November 2022 or March 2023 for citations published from 2018-2022 using a comprehensive search strategy aimed at retrieving articles pertaining to COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2. Additional searches were used to determine how many articles were published annually, how many citations by country/territory, the different types of articles published, and the number of retracted publications. Then publication rates were plotted using Microsoft Excel. Percentages of different publication types and COVID-19 literature were calculated using Excel. Additionally, the percent increase of number of citations published from year to year was also calculated when relevant.Results: The amount of biomedical literature citations published yearly that can be accessed on PubMed increased from 2018 to 2021 similarly the number of COVID-19 citations published yearly also increased from 2019 to 2021. Most publication types had an increase in the number of yearly publications from 2018 to 2021, a similar trend occurred in COVID-19 publications. The number of preprint citations increased from 2020 to 2021 and the total number of updated citations is 59%. The number of PubMed citations that were retracted yearly is less than 1% and currently peaked in 2019 at 0.09% of published papers. COVID-19 had fewer retracted papers with only 0.04% in both 2020 and 2021. Most countries had an increase in the number of citations from 2019 to 2021 plateauing in 2022, the exceptions were China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong who had more 2022 citations, a similar pattern was seen in COVID-19 citations.Conclusion: The increases in yearly COVID-19 publications were more pronounced than the yearly biomedical publication increases on PubMed. There is not a higher percent of retracted papers in the COVID-19 subject area. Most countries had similar citation patterns for all subjects as well as COVID-19 with some exceptions.