Alix School of Medicine, Mayo Clinic Hospital, Rochester, Minnesota, United States of America.
Department of Radiology, Mayo Clinic Hospital, Rochester, Minnesota, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 Jul 27;17(7):e0271071. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271071. eCollection 2022.
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.
自 2020 年初以来,Covid-19 一直是全球关注的焦点。作为回应,科学界投入了大量资源来研究该病毒及其影响。在整个文献中,Covid-19 出版物被引用的次数似乎非常高,但并没有与同一期刊中同一时期的非 Covid-19 论文直接进行比较。在我们的研究中,我们使用 Clarivate 的 Web of Science-Science Citation Index Expanded™数据库来识别 2020 年 1 月 1 日至 2021 年 12 月 31 日期间在 24 种主要科学期刊上发表的 Covid-19 论文。我们使用关键字“Covid-19”、“coronavirus”和“sars-cov-2”进行搜索,以找到标题中包含这些词的出版物。然后,我们量化这些论文收到的引用数量,并将其与同一期刊中同一时期的非 Covid-19 论文进行比较。我们发现,在 24 种开放获取和订阅制科学期刊中,过去 2 年发表的 Covid-19 论文目前的中位数引用率为 120.79,而非 Covid-19 论文的引用率为 21.63。当使用负二项回归来最小化文章数量变化和研究领域等其他变量的影响时,Covid-19 论文的引用率仍然比非 Covid-19 论文增加了 80%以上。这些新发现表明,Covid-19 论文的引用率明显高于同一期刊中包含的非 Covid-19 文章。这表明期刊影响因子是最近发表的文章收到的引用数量的产物,可能会受到期刊前几年收录的 Covid-19 论文数量的极大影响。