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. 2022 Jul 12;119(28):e2204074119.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2204074119. Epub 2022 Jul 7.

Massive covidization of research citations and the citation elite

John P A Ioannidis  1   2   3   4   5 , Eran Bendavid  1 , Maia Salholz-Hillel  6 , Kevin W Boyack  7 , Jeroen Baas  8
Affiliations

Massive covidization of research citations and the citation elite

John P A Ioannidis et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

Massive scientific productivity accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluated the citation impact of COVID-19 publications relative to all scientific work published in 2020 to 2021 and assessed the impact on scientist citation profiles. Using Scopus data until August 1, 2021, COVID-19 items accounted for 4% of papers published, 20% of citations received to papers published in 2020 to 2021, and >30% of citations received in 36 of the 174 disciplines of science (up to 79.3% in general and internal medicine). Across science, 98 of the 100 most-cited papers published in 2020 to 2021 were related to COVID-19; 110 scientists received ≥10,000 citations for COVID-19 work, but none received ≥10,000 citations for non-COVID-19 work published in 2020 to 2021. For many scientists, citations to their COVID-19 work already accounted for more than half of their total career citation count. Overall, these data show a strong covidization of research citations across science, with major impact on shaping the citation elite.

Keywords: COVID-19; bibliometrics; citations.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interest statement: The Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) has been funded by grants from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. J.P.A.I. has a visiting Einstein fellowship from the Einstein Foundation and Stiftung Charité. J.B. is an Elsevier employee and Elsevier runs Scopus, which is the source of the data.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Distribution of the publications with different numbers of citations until August 1 of the next calendar year for publications published in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. For publications published in 2020, separate data are shown for COVID-19 publications and non–COVID-19 publications.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Trajectory of annual ranking (based on composite citation indicator) for 54 scientists who were among the top-300 for the citation impact of their COVID-19 publications and among these top-20,000 for the cumulative citation impact of their work by August 1, 2021.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Correlation between coauthorship-adjusted hm-index for work published in 2020 to 2021 and coauthorship-adjusted hm-index for entire career (Upper) and lack of correlation between coauthorship-adjusted hm-index for COVID-19 work published in 2020 to 2021 and coauthorship-adjusted hm-index for entire career (Lower).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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