No time for that now! Qualitative changes in manuscript peer review during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The global Covid-19 pandemic has had considerable impact on the scientific enterprise, including scholarly publication and peer review practices. Several studies have assessed these impacts, showing among others that medical journals have strongly accelerated their review processes for Covid-19 related content. This has raised questions and concerns regarding the quality of the review process and the standards to which manuscripts are held for publication. To address these questions, this study sets out to assess qualitative differences in review reports and editorial decision letters for Covid-19 related, articles not related to Covid-19 published during the 2020 pandemic, and articles published before the pandemic. It employs the open peer review model at the British Medical Journal and eLife to study the content of review reports, editorial decisions, author responses, and open reader comments. It finds no clear differences between review processes of articles not related to Covid-19 published during or before the pandemic. However, it does find notable diversity between Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 related articles, including fewer requests for additional experiments, more cooperative comments, and different suggestions to address too strong claims. In general, the findings suggest that both reviewers and journal editors implicitly and explicitly use different quality criteria to assess Covid-19 related manuscripts, hence transforming science’s main evaluation mechanism for their underlying studies and potentially affecting their public dissemination.

Preprints in motion: tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic

“…The duration of peer review has drastically shortened for COVID-19 manuscripts, although analyses suggest that these reports are no less thorough [22]. However, in the absence of peer review reports (Fig.…”

Research in COVID times—Innovations, revolutions and contentions

“…Journals started publishing COVID-19 papers faster than articles on other topics through fast- track review process. [ 12 ] Many journals and publishers tried to make research findings easily accessible by making articles open access, opening up pay walls on COVID-19 articles and encouraging authors to upload their COVID-19 papers on preprint research servers like medRxiv and bioRxiv before publication. [ 13 ] It is estimated that around 1300 preprints related to COVID-19 were posted between January and September 2020 on the preprint server bioRxiv.…”

“…Cooperative comments by peer reviewers and suggestions to improve manuscript quality were more common than criticism/open questions for COVID articles. [ 12 ]…”

“…To date, several high-impact studies in well-reputed journals have been retracted, withdrawn or noted with concern following the evidence of research misconduct like duplicate publication or non-availability of underlying data, and unfortunately, Asia is the source of most of these manuscripts. [ 12 15 ] It is imperative to reiterate here the fact that retractions bring down the academic and scientific integrity of the author, their institution and the concerned journal and also result in a waste of research findings. [ 15 ]…”

Show me the study! Science by press release is not science

“…The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome caused by SARS-CoV-2 [1] resulted in a worldwide pandemic and also in a deluge of fast-tracked COVID-19-related scientific publications [2][3][4][5]. Accelerated time from submission to publication [6][7][8] and qualitative changes in the peer review processes [9] could imply lower quality of peer review in COVID-19 research. Evidence of lower quality of studies during the pandemic has indeed been found [2,[10][11][12].…”