The rapid, massive growth of COVID-19 authors in the scientific literature

Abstract

We examined the extent to which the scientific workforce in different fields was engaged in publishing COVID-19-related papers. According to Scopus (data cut, 1 August 2021), 210 183 COVID-19-related publications included 720 801 unique authors, of which 360 005 authors had published at least five full papers in their career and 23 520 authors were at the top 2% of their scientific subfield based on a career-long composite citation indicator. The growth of COVID-19 authors was far more rapid and massive compared with cohorts of authors historically publishing on H1N1, Zika, Ebola, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. All 174 scientific subfields had some specialists who had published on COVID-19. In 109 of the 174 subfields of science, at least one in 10 active, influential (top 2% composite citation indicator) authors in the subfield had authored something on COVID-19. Fifty-three hyper-prolific authors had already at least 60 (and up to 227) COVID-19 publications each. Among the 300 authors with the highest composite citation indicator for their COVID-19 publications, most common countries were USA (n = 67), China (n = 52), UK (n = 32) and Italy (n = 18). The rapid and massive involvement of the scientific workforce in COVID-19-related work is unprecedented and creates opportunities and challenges. There is evidence for hyper-prolific productivity.

Keywords: COVID-19; authorship; bibliometrics; citations; productivity.

Figure 1.

Topics of prominence for COVID-19 authors and publications. The columns represent the progress of the spread at three different measuring points: by end of February 2020, end of June 2020, end of October 2020 and end of July 2021. The first row represents the spread of authors of COVID-19 papers. The authors are assigned to their most dominant topic in their career. The data are filtered to include only topics with greater than or equal to five authors assigned. The second row shows similarly the topics of the top 2% authors by field according to a composite citations indicator. Only topics with two or more authors are displayed. The third row displays the spread of COVID-19 publications across topics. The minimum threshold for a topic to be displayed is set to five COVID-19 publications. Of note, the author panels show more dispersed distributions than the publication topic panels, suggesting that several authors are moving out of their main career topics to publish on COVID-19.

Figure 2.

Authors publishing on different infectious diseases and COVID-19 every year among the approximately 8 million authors who have published at least five full papers by 2020. (a) New author ‘cases’ per year (authors who publish for the first time on the respective topic, without having any previous publications on this same topic in previous years). (b) All active author ‘cases’ per year (all authors who publish on the respective topic in each year, regardless of whether they have also published on the same topic in previous years or not).

Figure 3.

Frequency of authors according to the number of COVID-19 publications among the authors in Scopus with five or more publications in total on any topic.