The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on arXiv pre-prints in maths, physics, computer science, and quantitative biology

'Publish or perish' is an expression describing the pressure on academics to consistently publish research to ensure a successful career in academia. With a global pandemic that has changed the world, how has it changed academic productivity? Here we show that academics in science and technology specialisations are posting more manuscripts on the arXiv pre-print server than would be expected had the pandemic not occurred: 341,474 pre-prints were posted between 2020-2021, up 14% from 2019 and above the predictions of our Gaussian process model. We find that that most individual fields were not measurably affected by the pandemic. However, we do observe a significant ongoing decline in general physics pre-prints, as well as temporary declines in areas of high-energy physics, where the cancellation of a key conference played a key role. The most significant increase occurred in the arXiv category of quantitative biology, where a 50% increase () in pre-prints posted in 2020 was driven by research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these 'COVID papers' are by biologists using arXiv for the first time, but many are written by researchers from other fields (e.g., physicists, mathematicians).