The Great Inflation: How COVID-19 affected the Journal Impact Factor of high impact medical journals

Abstract:  The journal impact factor (IF) is the leading method of scholarly assessment in today’s research world, influencing where scholars submit their research and funders distribute their resources. The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), one of the most serious health crises, resulted in an unprecedented surge of publications across all areas of knowledge. An important question is whether COVID-19 affected the “gold standard of scholarly assessment”. We took as an example six high impact general medicine journals (Annals, BMJ, Lancet, Nature, NEJM and JAMA) and searched the literature using the Web of Science database for manuscripts published between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2021. To assess the effect of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 literature in their scholarly impact, we calculated their annual IFs and percentage changes. Thereafter, we estimated the citation probability of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 publications along with their publication and citation rates by journal. A significant increase in IF change for COVID-19 manuscripts published from 2019 to 2020 was seen, against non-COVID-19 ones. The likelihood of highly cited publications was significantly increased in COVID-19 manuscripts from 2019 to 2021.The publication and citation rates of COVID-19 publications followed a positive trajectory, as opposed to non-COVID-19. The citation rate for COVID-19 publications peaked 10 months earlier than the publication rate. The rapid surge of COVID-19 publications emphasised the capacity of scientific communities to respond against a global health emergency, yet inflated IFs create ambiguity as benchmark tools for assessing scholarly impact. The immediate implication is a loss in value of and trust on journal IFs as metrics of research and scientific rigour perceived by academia and the society. Loss of confidence towards procedures employed by highly reputable publishers may incentivise authors to exploit the publication process by monopolising their research on COVID-19 and encourage them towards publishing in journals of predatory behaviour.