National Publication Productivity during the COVID-19 Pandemic-A Preliminary Exploratory Analysis of the 30 Countries Most Affected

Simon M Müller; Georg F Mueller; Alexander A Navarini; Oliver Brandt

doi:10.3390/biology9090271

National Publication Productivity during the COVID-19 Pandemic-A Preliminary Exploratory Analysis of the 30 Countries Most Affected

Biology (Basel). 2020 Sep 5;9(9):271. doi: 10.3390/biology9090271.

Authors

Simon M Müller¹, Georg F Mueller², Alexander A Navarini¹, Oliver Brandt^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Dermatology, University Hospital Basel, 4056 Basel, Switzerland.
² Applied Computational Life Sciences, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, 8400 Winterthur, Switzerland.
³ Pediatric Respiratory Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Inselspital, University of Bern, 3010 Bern, Switzerland.

Abstract

Background: The COVID 19 pandemic increased publication productivity enormously with numerous new COVID-19-related articles appearing daily, despite the fact that many health care workers in the partially overburdened national health care systems were faced with major challenges.

Methods: In a cross-sectional, observational, retrospective study we compared and correlated 17 epidemiologic, health care system-related and health-economic factors from medical databases and intergovernmental organisations potentially influencing the COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 publication productivity between 1 January and 30 April 2020 amongst the 30 countries most severely affected by the pandemic. These factors were additionally correlated with the national pre-COVID-19 publication rate for the same pre-year period to identify potential changes in the general publication behaviour.

Findings: COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 publication rates correlated strongest with access to and quality of health care (ρ = 0.80 and 0.87, p < 0.0001), COVID-19 cases per capita (ρ = 0.78 and 0.72, p < 0.0001), GDP per capita (ρ = 0.69 and 0.76, p < 0.0001), health spending per capita (ρ = 0.61 and 0.73, p < 0.0001) and the pre-COVID-19 Hirsch-Index (ρ = 0.61 and 0.62, p = 0.002 and <0.0001). Ratios of publication rates for "Cancer", "Diabetes" and "Stroke" in 2020 versus the pre-year period were 0.88 ± 0.06, 1.02 ± 0.18 and 0.9 ± 0.20, resulting in a pooled ratio of 0.93 ± 0.06 for non-COVID-19 publications.

Interpretation: There are marked geographic and national differences in publication productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both COVID-19- and non-COVID-19 publication productivity correlates with epidemiologic, health care system-related and healtheconomic factors, and pre-COVID publication expertise. Countries with a stable scientific infrastructure appear to maintain non-COVID-19 publication productivity nearly at the pre-year level and at the same time use their resilience to produce COVID-19 publications at high rates.

Keywords: COVID-19; Sars-CoV2, publication productivity, research activity; pandemic.