How COVID-19 affected academic publishing: a 3-year study of 17 million research papers | International Journal of Epidemiology | Oxford Academic

"Throughout 2020–2, 3.7% of English-language research output was on the topic of COVID-19. Journal articles on COVID-19 were published at a consistent rate during this period, while preprints peaked in early 2020 and decreased thereafter. COVID-19 preprints had lower publication rates in the peer-reviewed literature than other preprints, particularly those that were preprinted during early 2020. COVID-19 research received significantly more media and social media attention than non-COVID-19 research, and preprints received more attention, on average, than journal articles, with attention peaking during the initial wave and subsequent peaks corresponding to the emergence of novel variants. COVID-19 articles exhibited a higher correlation between Altmetrics and citation metrics compared with non-COVID-19 publications, suggesting a strong alignment between scientific and public attention."