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The significant yet short-term influence of research covidization on journal citation metrics (preprint)
biorxiv; 2023.
Preprint
in English
| bioRxiv | ID: ppzbmed-10.1101.2023.03.05.531213
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has emerged as a significant research hotspot in recent years, leading to a surge in production and citations received by COVID-19 papers. While concerns have been raised about the potential citation boost on journals associated with publishing COVID-19 papers, the extent and mechanisms of such boost remain unclear. This study uses a generalized difference-in-differences approach to examine the impact of publishing COVID-19 papers on journal citations and related metrics in four highly covidized fields. Our results demonstrate that in health sciences fields, journals starting to publish COVID-19 papers in 2020 experienced a significant increase in citations compared with other journals. This trend continued in 2021, although to a lesser extent. However, such citation premiums became insignificant for journals starting to publish COVID-19 papers in 2021. In some fields, we also observed that COVID-19 papers increased the citations of non-COVID-19 papers in the same journals, but only for journals starting to publish COVID-19 papers in 2020. Our heterogeneity test indicates that COVID-19 papers published in prestigious journals brought more significant citation premiums to the journals and non-COVID-19 papers in most fields. We finally show that these citation premiums can affect various citation-based journal metrics. Our findings reveal a "gold rush" pattern in which early entrants are more likely to establish their citation advantage in research hotspots and caution against using such metrics to evaluate journal quality.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
Preprints
Database:
bioRxiv
Main subject:
COVID-19
Language:
English
Year:
2023
Document Type:
Preprint
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