Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak has posed an unprecedented challenge to humanity and science. On the one side, public and private incentives have been put in place to promptly allocate resources toward research areas strictly related to the COVID-19 emergency. However, research in many fields not directly related to the pandemic has been displaced. In this paper, we assess the impact of COVID-19 on world scientific production in the life sciences and find indications that the usage of medical subject headings (MeSH) has changed following the outbreak. We estimate through a difference-in-differences approach the impact of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific production using the PubMed database (3.6 Million research papers). We find that COVID-19-related MeSH terms have experienced a 6.5 fold increase in output on average, while publications on unrelated MeSH terms dropped by 10 to 12%. The publication weighted impact has an even more pronounced negative effect (-16% to -19%). Moreover, COVID-19 has displaced clinical trial publications (-24%) and diverted grants from research areas not closely related to COVID-19. Note that since COVID-19 publications may have been fast-tracked, the sudden surge in COVID-19 publications might be driven by editorial policy.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized the world scientific community in 2020, especially in the life sciences [1, 2]
We look at the year over year growth in the number of the impact weighted number of publications per Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term from 2018 to 2019 and 2019 to 2020 as defined in the methods section
By comparing the growth of the number of publications from the years 2018, 2019 and 2020, we find that the impact factor weighted number of publications has increased by up to a factor of 100 compared to the previous year for Betacoronavirus, one of the most closely related to COVID-19 MeSH term
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized the world scientific community in 2020, especially in the life sciences [1, 2]. The number of clinical trials related to COVID-19 prophylaxis and treatments skyrocketed [4]. Thanks to the rapid mobilization of the world scientific community, COVID-19 vaccines have been developed in record time. Despite this undeniable success, there is a rising concern about the negative consequences of COVID-19 on clinical trial research, with many projects being postponed [5–7]. According to Evaluate Pharma, clinical trials were one of the pandemic’s first casualties, with a record number of 160 studies suspended for reasons related to COVID-19 in April 2020 [8, 9] reporting a total of 1,200 trials suspended as of July 2020. The COVID-19 outbreak took a tall on women and early-
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