Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact in major medical journals

Two partly conflicting academic pressures from the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic are the need for faster peer review of Covid-19 health-related research and greater scrutiny of its findings. This paper investigates whether decreases in peer review durations for Covid-19 articles were universal across 97 major medical journals, as well as Nature, Science, and Cell. The results suggest that on average, Covid-19 articles submitted during 2020 were reviewed 1.7–2.1 times faster than non-Covid-19 articles submitted during 2017–2020. Nevertheless, while the review speed of Covid-19 research was particularly fast during the first 5 months (1.9–3.4 times faster) of the pandemic (January–May 2020), this speed advantage was no longer evident for articles submitted in November–December 2020. Faster peer review was also associated with higher citation impact for Covid-19 articles in the same journals, suggesting it did not usually compromise the scholarly impact of important Covid-19 research. Overall, then, it seems that core medical and general journals responded quickly but carefully to the pandemic, although the situation returned closer to normal within a year.