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Comparison of citation rates between Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles across 24 major scientific journals

ABSTRACT: Covid-19 has been front and center in the global landscape since the beginning of 2020. In response, the scientific field has dedicated enormous amounts of resources to researching the virus and its effects. The number of times Covid-19 publications are being cited throughout the literature appears remarkably high but has not been directly compared to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals over an extended period. In our study, we use Clarivate’s Web of Science—Science Citation Index Expanded™ database to identify Covid-19 papers published in 24 major scientific journals over a period of 24 months from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021. We conduct our search using keywords “Covid-19”, “coronavirus”, and “sars-cov-2” to locate publications with these words in the title. We then quantify the number of citations these papers have received and compare rates to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals over the same timeframe. We find that, across 24 open-access and subscription-based scientific journals, Covid-19 papers published in the past 2 years currently have a median citation rate of 120.79 compared to 21.63 for non-Covid-19 papers. When negative binomial regression is used to minimize the influence of other variables such as article number variation and field of research, Covid-19 papers have still experienced more than 80% increase in citations relative to non-Covid-19 papers. These novel findings demonstrate that Covid-19 papers are being cited at remarkably higher rates than non-Covid-19 articles contained within the same journals. This suggests that journal impact factor, which is a product of the number of citations that recently published articles receive, will likely be drastically influenced by the number of Covid-19 papers that a journal has included within its pages in the previous years.

SUBMITTER: Brandt M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9328554 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:On 5th December 2012, a scientific article reviewing a change in the feeding behaviour of the European catfish, one of the largest freshwater fish, was published in the American scientific journal, PLOS ONE, an open access journal, which also allows the mass publication of pictures and videos. Within a few days following the publication of this article, it was relayed by numerous web sites and generated a media craze. In this paper, we analyse the circulation of this scientific information in the sphere of Web-based media during the two months following its publication, by revealing the citation mechanisms of the original article and the logic of the Internet users participating in its diffusion. In addition, since the circulation of its informational content travelled beyond linguistic and geographical boundaries, we chose to compare the citation modalities and intertextual relationships of documents in the three countries where the article spread the most widely, namely: France, the United States and Great Britain. Even though our study shows that the media circulation of scientific papers operates in a traditional way, the intertextual analysis underlines the grand variety of participants (such as journalists, non-scientists, fishermen, technology enthusiasts and Internet users) involved in the diffusion of this information, each of them mobilizing different intertextual strategies, according to their various targets. They all transformed, reformulated and appropriated the scientific information according to their own, unique interests. This study also emphasizes the importance of journalistic websites as opinion relays. They were the first diffusers involved in spreading the information but this role was rarely acknowledged by the Internet users - through citations, for example. In contrast, we observed that amateurs' communities (communities of practices and communities of interest of fishermen or of buzz fans), which only became involved in a second temporal phase of the spreading, preferred to build up their credibility through citations of the original article. Finally, this research helps to rethink the mechanisms of the circulation of scientific information in the Web-based media, highlighting both the variety and the inventiveness of the interactions between the academic and public spheres.

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Comparison of citation rates between Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles across 24 major scientific journals

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