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The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific research in the life sciences

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  • Massimo Riccaboni
  • Luca Verginer

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has posed an unprecedented challenge to humanity and science. On the one side, public and private incentives have been put in place to promptly allocate resources toward research areas strictly related to the COVID-19 emergency. However, research in many fields not directly related to the pandemic has been displaced. In this paper, we assess the impact of COVID-19 on world scientific production in the life sciences and find indications that the usage of medical subject headings (MeSH) has changed following the outbreak. We estimate through a difference-in-differences approach the impact of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific production using the PubMed database (3.6 Million research papers). We find that COVID-19-related MeSH terms have experienced a 6.5 fold increase in output on average, while publications on unrelated MeSH terms dropped by 10 to 12%. The publication weighted impact has an even more pronounced negative effect (-16% to -19%). Moreover, COVID-19 has displaced clinical trial publications (-24%) and diverted grants from research areas not closely related to COVID-19. Note that since COVID-19 publications may have been fast-tracked, the sudden surge in COVID-19 publications might be driven by editorial policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Massimo Riccaboni & Luca Verginer, 2022. "The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific research in the life sciences," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(2), pages 1-16, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0263001
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263001
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    Cited by:

    1. Hudson Pacifico Silva & Pascale Lehoux & Renata Pozelli Sabio, 2024. "Challenges to Responsible Value Creation During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Multiple Case Study on SMEs’ Transformative Responses," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 15(3), pages 14012-14035, September.
    2. Marek Deja, 2025. "The causal effect of the global crisis on open science research impact: a bibliometric causal analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 130(2), pages 1303-1325, February.
    3. Uddin, Shahadat & Khan, Arif & Lu, Haohui, 2023. "Impact of COVID-19 on Journal Impact Factor," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(4).
    4. Smith, D. Grace & Elwy, A. Rani & Rosen, Rochelle K. & Bueno, Mario & Sarkar, Indra Neil, 2024. "Who's in control? Situating expertise, (mis)trust, and power among the Latine/Hispanic community in COVID-19's liminal moments," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 354(C).
    5. Carolina Biliotti & Luca Verginer & Massimo Riccaboni, 2024. "Breaking New Ground, Reinforcing Old Gaps: Gender Disparities in Access to Emerging Research Frontiers," Papers 2404.04707, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2025.

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