Immediate and longer-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific productivity in ecology and evolution

TL;DR

The study shows that the COVID-19 pandemic initially increased scientific submissions in ecology and evolution, but productivity has since declined, with no change in acceptance rates.

Contribution

The paper provides a long-term analysis of pandemic effects on scientific productivity using journal data from 2012 to 2023.

Findings

Submission rates spiked at the start of the pandemic but have since declined sharply.

Acceptance rates remained stable, indicating no change in journal quality standards.

Productivity trends varied by country and journal, but not by journal impact factor.

Abstract

While the subject of much speculation, most quantitative assessments of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific productivity (i) are based on self-reported survey data, (ii) cover only a short period of time, (iii) may be biased by an increase in COVID-19-based research, (iv) cover a limited range of publishers or publishing outlets, and/or (v) cannot distinguish between changes in submission versus acceptance rates. Here we analyse submission and acceptance data from 2012 to 2023 for 25 journals in ecology and evolution, a field that has produced relatively few COVID-19-related articles. We show that although submission rates spiked when the pandemic began, they have been plummeting since. While there is variation in these patterns among countries and journals, the latter is unrelated to journal impact factor. The absence of a coinciding change in acceptance rates suggests that journals have not changed their quality standards to buffer these trends in productivity. Together, this demonstrates dynamic but long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific productivity, suggestive of fundamental changes to scientific practice and communication. A profitable direction for future research would be to build upon our results by targeting topic-, method- and system-related variation in productivity within and across journals.

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