Abstract
We examined the extent to which the scientific workforce in different fields was engaged in publishing COVID-19-related papers. According to Scopus (data cut, 1 August 2021), 210 183 COVID-19-related publications included 720 801 unique authors, of which 360 005 authors had published at least five full papers in their career and 23 520 authors were at the top 2% of their scientific subfield based on a career-long composite citation indicator. The growth of COVID-19 authors was far more rapid and massive compared with cohorts of authors historically publishing on H1N1, Zika, Ebola, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. All 174 scientific subfields had some specialists who had published on COVID-19. In 109 of the 174 subfields of science, at least one in 10 active, influential (top 2% composite citation indicator) authors in the subfield had authored something on COVID-19. Fifty-three hyper-prolific authors had already at least 60 (and up to 227) COVID-19 publications each. Among the 300 authors with the highest composite citation indicator for their COVID-19 publications, most common countries were USA (n = 67), China (n = 52), UK (n = 32) and Italy (n = 18). The rapid and massive involvement of the scientific workforce in COVID-19-related work is unprecedented and creates opportunities and challenges. There is evidence for hyper-prolific productivity.
Highlights
The acute crisis of COVID-19 has challenged the scientific community to generate timely evidence about the new coronavirus and its pandemic
The most influential scientists across science were even more commonly engaged with COVID-19 research
More than half of the active, influential scientists in several scientific subfields were involved urgently in COVID-19 work, and every single scientific subfield had some scientists publishing on COVID-19
Summary
The acute crisis of COVID-19 has challenged the scientific community to generate timely evidence about the new coronavirus and its pandemic. Interest in COVID-19 has spread rapidly and widely royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R. Across the scientific literature and among researchers. Such an ‘all hands on deck’ response of the scientific 2 workforce during a crisis may have been beneficial in generating ideas and evidence expeditiously. Many authors publishing on COVID-19 may have lacked proper background expertise. The explosive focus on COVID-19 may have caused some inappropriate ‘covidization’ of research [1,2], and the resulting research, conducted in such haste, may suffer from low validity [3,4]
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