Competing with a pandemic: Trends in research design in a time of Covid-19

During the Covid-19 pandemic, major journals have published a significant number of Covid-19 related articles in a short period of time. While this is necessary to combat the worldwide pandemic, it may have trade-offs with respect to publishing research from other disciplines. To assess differences...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2020-09, Vol.15 (9), p.e0238831-e0238831
Main Authors: Bian, Shelly X, Lin, Eugene
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Betacoronavirus - isolation & purification
Clinical trials
Coronavirus Infections - epidemiology
Coronavirus Infections - pathology
Coronavirus Infections - virology
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Cross-Sectional Studies
Design analysis
Epidemics
Evaluation
Humans
Hypotheses
Medical publishing
Medical research
Medicine
Medicine and Health Sciences
Pandemics
Pneumonia, Viral - epidemiology
Pneumonia, Viral - pathology
Pneumonia, Viral - virology
Randomization
Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
Research - trends
Research and Analysis Methods
Research design
SARS-CoV-2
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
Statistics
Trends
United States
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Summary:During the Covid-19 pandemic, major journals have published a significant number of Covid-19 related articles in a short period of time. While this is necessary to combat the worldwide pandemic, it may have trade-offs with respect to publishing research from other disciplines. To assess differences in published research design before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. We performed a cross-sectional review of all 322 full-length research studies published between October 1, 2019 and April 30, 2020 in three major medical journals. We compared the number of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and studies with a control group before and after January 31, 2020, when Covid-19 began garnering international attention. The number of full-length research studies per issue was not statistically different before and after the Covid-19 pandemic (from 3.7 to 3.5 per issue, p = 0.17). Compared to before January 31, 2020, 0.7 fewer non-Covid-19 studies per issue were published versus after January 31, 2020 (p
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0238831