Clinician researchers have raised concerns that publication of important new research on diseases other than COVID-19 is being delayed as an influx of research on the pandemic take precedence in medical journals.
Medical Journal of Australia Editor-In-Chief Professor Nick Talley says it appears researchers are finding it more difficult to get their work published if it is not on COVID-19, given the public health priority to disseminate new research on the pandemic.
He was talking to the limbic after the issue was raised on Twitter by Dr Scott Halpern, a US-based critical care medicine specialist and Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
My sample size as an author, reviewer, and editorial board member is now sufficient to conclude that authors of non-COVID papers that would have previously been competitive at top 5-7 clinical journals would be better off withholding submission for several more months at least 1/
— Scott Halpern (@ScottHalpernMD) September 21, 2020
The deluge of COVID-19 journal articles has itself become the focus of research: a study published in PLOSOne found that after January 2020, non-COVID-19 full-length studies decreased by 0.7 per issue on average.
“The flood of submissions and the demand for COVID-19 related work presents publishers and editors with the dilemma of accepting fewer non-COVID-19 publications, quality notwithstanding,” the authors wrote. And the rejection or delay of such papers would contribute to a growing backlog of unpublished non-COVID-19 related research, hindering further dissemination, they suggested.
Meanwhile another study found there were 23,634 journal papers published related to COVID-19 in the first six months of 2020 in journals that are indexed on two major databases – Web of Science and Scopus. Of these, almost half (47.6%) were research papers, with the largest number of COVID-19 related papers published by the BMJ (456), Journal of Medical Virology (248) and The Lancet (183).
Professor Talley, a leading gastroenterology researcher and Laureate Professor in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle, said there appeared to have been a big jump overall in submissions to journals – both of COVID-19 and non-COVID-related papers.