Impact of COVID-19 on Journal Impact Factor

Abstract

Research related to COVID-19 has grown significantly in recent years and dominated health-related publications. Analysing the quality of COVID-19 research across journals, how the journals prioritised emerging topics, how their prominence has changed during this time etc. - are critical to understanding the scientific community, especially for prospective researchers and editors. Based on the scoring systems of the Impact Factor and its six years of data (2016-21) for 12,873 journals, this study explores how the journal’s impact was affected by COVID-19-related research. We examined the variability between non-pandemic periods and pandemic periods regarding the effect of COVID-19 on the growth of journal performance. The result indicates that journals with COVID-19-related publications show a significantly higher increase in their Impact Factor (IF) values and journals with lower IF values contributed most to this increase. Journals prioritising publishing COVID-19 research will likely experience increased visibility and IF growth in the long run.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.