Abstract
COVID-19 has emerged as a significant research hotspot in recent years, leading to a surge in production and citations received by COVID-19 papers. While concerns have been raised about the potential citation boost on journals associated with publishing COVID-19 papers, the extent and mechanisms of such gain remain unclear. This study uses a generalized difference-in-differences approach to examine the impact of publishing COVID-19 papers on journal citations and related metrics in four highly covidized fields. Our results demonstrate that journals starting publishing COVID-19 papers in health sciences fields in 2020 experienced a significant increase in citations compared with other journals. This trend continued in 2021, although to a lesser extent. However, such citation premiums became insignificant for journals starting to publish COVID-19 papers in 2021. In some fields, we also observed that COVID-19 papers increased the citations of non-COVID-19 papers in the same journals, but only for journals starting to publish COVID-19 papers in 2020. Our heterogeneity test indicates that COVID-19 papers published in prestigious journals brought more significant citation premiums to the journals and non-COVID-19 papers in most fields. We finally show that these citation premiums can affect various citation-based journal metrics. Our findings reveal a “gold rush” pattern in which early entrants are more likely to establish their citation advantage in research hotspots and caution against using such metrics to evaluate journal quality.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Competing Interest Statement: The authors declare no competing interest.
