A flood of coronavirus research swept websites and journals this year. It changed how and what scientists study, a Nature analysis shows. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted science in 2020 — and transformed research publishing, show data collated and analysed by Nature.
The obvious question here is whether the disruptions and changes will endure beyond the pandemic, lockdowns and working from home. Whether the drivers will return to normal, or if we are seeing the start of a new normal.
Submissions to publisher Elsevier’s journals alone were up by around 270,000 — or 58% — between February and May when compared with the same period in 2019, one analysis found1. The increase was even higher for health and medicine titles, at a whopping 92%.
- Squazzoni, F. et al. Preprint at SSRN http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3712813 (2020).
