Citation advantage of COVID-19 related publications

TL;DR

This study empirically demonstrates that COVID-19 related publications have a significant citation advantage, with over 8% becoming highly cited, potentially affecting bibliometric indicators and journal impact assessments.

Contribution

It provides large-scale empirical evidence of the citation advantage of COVID-19 papers and discusses its impact on bibliometric measures.

Findings

Over 8% of COVID-19 papers were highly cited, exceeding the 1% benchmark.

COVID-19 papers show citation advantages across categories, countries, and impact factor quartiles.

The citation advantage distorts traditional bibliometric indicators like journal impact factor.

Abstract

With the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists from various disciplines responded quickly to this historical public health emergency. The sudden boom of COVID-19 related papers in a short period of time may bring unexpected influence to some commonly used bibliometric indicators. By a large-scale investigation using Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, this brief communication confirms the citation advantage of COVID-19 related papers empirically through the lens of Essential Science Indicators' highly cited paper. More than 8% of COVID-19 related papers published during 2020 and 2021 were selected as Essential Science Indicators highly cited papers, which was much higher than the set global benchmark value of 1%. The citation advantage of COVID-19 related papers for different Web of Science categories/countries/journal impact factor quartiles were also demonstrated. The distortions of COVID-19 related papers' citation advantage to some bibliometric indicators such as journal impact factor were discussed at the end of this brief communication.