key: cord-0892803-4u7jyn90
authors: Warren, Victor T.; Thomas, Reed; Boyd, Carter J.; Hemal, Kshipra; Ying, Yedeh P.
title: Analyzing the Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Literature
date: 2021-07-16
journal: J Oral Maxillofac Surg
DOI: 10.1016/j.joms.2021.06.037
sha: 3a1e90419c20f96e7dd660f1ac80559201fa1a09
doc_id: 892803
cord_uid: 4u7jyn90

nan

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered our world. Many of these changes directly impacted the clinical practice of oral and maxillofacial surgery. Somewhat less immediately apparent is the effect of COVID-19 on the oral-maxillofacial surgery literature. An advanced PubMed search was designed to look for all articles published in these journals in 2020, which yielded a total of 2,023 articles. Articles were subsequently screened and sorted into COVID-19 related and non-COVID-19 related studies. Titles containing "COVID", "SARS", "pandemic", "corona", "COVID-19", "2019 nCoV", "2019 novel coronavirus", or "SARS-CoV-2" were considered to be related to COVID-19. Two studies were found to be duplicates, and were subsequently removed.

Several article factors including journal of publication, country of origin, number of authors/institutions, word/reference count, subspecialty of oral-maxillofacial surgery to which the article pertains, article type, study design, month of publication, and time to publication were assessed. In addition to the data above, distribution and overall impact of articles was evaluated through number of citations accrued by an article and the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS), which is a weighted calculation of the attention an article receives online (Altmetric, London).

Mann-Whitney and Chi-squared tests were used to assess continuous and categorical variables respectively. Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to compare Altmetric scores and citations. Research methodology reflects earlier works in the plastic surgery literature (2) . Due to the nature of data acquisition from the literature, this study did not require approval from the University of Alabama at Birmingham Institutional Review Board. While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been recently studied in the dental literature, the present study is the first to specifically analyze the oral-maxillofacial surgery literature. Dentistry has been active in the publication of COVID-related articles, although mostly in the form of case reports, communications, and other studies with low levels of evidence (4, 5) . Similarly, our study corroborates these findings with the majority of articles classified as either editorials or low evidence original studies in the oral-maxillofacial surgery literature. Perhaps studies with overall less complexity led to the faster review times identified above.

As revealed by the citation and AAS data, COVID-19 related articles have remained popular throughout the pandemic. With persistent global outbreaks and the emergence of novel virus strains, COVID-19 will continue to be relevant in the foreseeable future. Dramatically reduced publication times and continued value placed on this topic will hopefully transition to the production of COVID-19 related studies with higher levels of evidence, leading to direct clinical applications. Collaboration between institutions, particularly in regards to COVID-19 related policies and clinical management may be the next step. Regardless of when this occurs, the current response to the pandemic, as chronicled in the oral-maxillofacial surgery literature, demonstrates the resilience and dedication of our specialty during the past challenging year.

Funding: None

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A bibliometric analysis of the dental scientific literature on COVID-19

Figure 1: Percentage of COVID-19 Articles Published by Journal Figure 2: Article and Study Type