Indian Contributions to COVID-19 Research on bioRxiv: A Bibliometric Review (2020–2022)

Preprint servers accelerated the dissemination of COVID-19 research, especially during 2020. This paper reviews evidence about India-linked COVID-19 preprints on the bioRxiv preprint server, focusing on volume, temporal dynamics, topical distribution, and institutional concentration. Quantitative figures are drawn primarily from a bibliometric study of Indian COVID-19 preprints deposited in bioRxiv and medRxiv using the NIH iSearch COVID-19 Portfolio (data through November 29, 2022). To contextualize these findings, we also report current (January 2026) counts from the bioRxiv/medRxiv COVID-19 collection page. Results show that India-linked COVID-19 bioRxiv preprints peaked in 2020 and declined thereafter, with a small share of total COVID-19 preprints on bioRxiv at the 2022 snapshot. Topic signals indicate prominence of infectious disease and epidemiology-related work, and institution-level outputs are concentrated among a small set of major national research organizations. The paper discusses implications for rapid, open biomedical communication and the need for regularly updated, affiliation-resolved datasets.