Scientific publication speed and retractions of COVID-19 pandemic original articles

Luisa Schonhaut B. · Italo Costa-Roldán · Ilan Oppenheimer S. · Dareen Han · Franco Díaz

34 citations0/0 files storedRevista Panamericana de Salud Pública

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Academic Publishing and Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Communication Academic Writing and Publishing

Abstract

Objective: To describe the editorial processing time of published COVID-19 research articles and compare this with a similar topic, human influenza, and analyze the number of publications, withdrawals, and retractions. Methods: A descriptive-analytical study using PubMed on research articles with the MeSH terms human influenza and COVID-19. Time to acceptance (from submission to acceptance) and time to publication (from acceptance to publication) were compared. Retractions and withdrawals were reviewed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Results: There were 31 319 research articles on COVID-19 and 4 287 on human influenza published during 2020. The median time to acceptance for COVID-19 was lower than that for human influenza (8 vs. 92 days). The median time to publication for COVID-19 articles was shorter than those on human influenza (12 vs. 16 days); 47.0% of COVID-19 research articles were accepted within the first week of submission, and 19.5% within one day. There were 82 retractions and withdrawals for COVID-19 articles, 1 for human influenza, and 5 for articles that contain both terms; these were mainly related to ethical misconduct, and 27 (31.0%) were published by the same group of authors in one highest-quartile journal. Conclusions: The conundrum between fast publishing and adequate standards is shown in this analysis of COVID-19 research articles. The speed of acceptance for COVID-19 manuscripts was 11.5 times faster than for human influenza. The high number of acceptances within a day or week of submission and the number of retractions and withdrawals of COVID-19 papers might be a warning sign about the possible lack of a quality control process in scientific publishing and the peer review process.

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References

2013The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals 2013Why Has the Number of Scientific Retractions Increased?2017Duration and quality of the peer review process: the author’s perspective 2020Pandemic publishing: Medical journals strongly speed up their publication process for COVID-19 2017Post retraction citations in context: a case study 2020An alarming retraction rate for scientific publications on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)2020COVID-19 research: pandemic versus “paperdemic”, integrity, values and risks of the “speed science”2016Why do some retracted papers continue to be cited?

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