key: cord-1049676-jtlb97kg
authors: Alkhouri, Nicole B.; Mutka, Maria C.; Stefanak, Matthew P.; Bearer, Cynthia
title: The impact of COVID-19 on manuscript submissions to Pediatric Research
date: 2020-11-02
journal: Pediatr Res
DOI: 10.1038/s41390-020-01220-9
sha: 43df50e74d8ec6f838eeea60e3b2f6573f612889
doc_id: 1049676
cord_uid: jtlb97kg

nan

Physician-scientists tend to lead very busy lives. Occasionally, a natural disaster can occur that limits the ability of physicianscientists to collect data for their research freeing up time for writing manuscripts. We investigate whether the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic affected the manuscript submission rate to Pediatric Research in February to July, 2020 (called the COVID-19 impacted period) compared to previous years 2017-2019. We expect to see more submissions to Pediatric Research during the months of this pandemic. A potential increase in manuscript submissions might be also due to an existing rise in submissions year by year or the advent of COVID-19 providing a rich new topic area for researchers to study and publish manuscripts about their findings. We hypothesize that an increase in initial manuscript submissions occurred during the COVID-19 impacted period. We further hypothesize that this increase in manuscript submissions could not be explained by submissions related to COVID-19 alone.

Monthly first submission manuscripts were obtained from the editorial office of Pediatric Research for the period of February 2017 through July 2020. Revised submissions were not included in this analysis. Manuscripts regarding COVID-19 were identified in the ScholarOne database by isolating manuscripts submitted in 2020 containing at least one of the following terms in its title: "COVID", "CORONA", and "SARS". R (Version 3.6.2) and the integrated development environment, R-Studio Desktop (Version 1.1.453), were used for all statistical analyses and graphing. 1 Monthly submission data including COVID-related articles were not normally distributed and were thus log-10 transformed to meet the assumption of normality. Monthly data excluding COVID-related articles were also not normally distributed and were natural-log transformed to meet the assumption of normality. Gaussian distribution was assessed using Shapiro-Wilk test for normality. Homogeneity of variance between years was confirmed using Levene's test. 2 Assessment of differences in mean submissions were averaged across the COVID-impacted period. One-way analysis of variance was used to evaluate differences in transformed averages between years (2017-2020). Post hoc Tukey honestly significant difference tests were used to assess post hoc comparisons between years. An α = 0.05 was selected as the significance cutoff level.

Total average submissions during the 6-month COVID-impacted period in 2020 were greater than total average submissions in 2017, 2018, and 2019 during the same period (p ≤ 0.001, p ≤ 0.001, and p = 0.006, respectively). Total average submissions were greater in 2019 than in 2017 as well (p = 0.0244). Total monthly submissions were highest in May, June, and July of 2020 at 144, 144, and 146, respectively.

Average monthly submissions excluding COVID-related articles were also assessed in this study. Average non-COVID articles were greater in 2020 than in 2017 and 2018 (p ≤ 0.001 and p = 0.0012, respectively), while non-COVID articles in 2020 trended toward being greater than those in 2019 (p = 0.0647). Average submissions in 2019 were also greater than average submissions in 2017 (p = 0.0123). Similar to total monthly submission, non-COVID submissions were highest in May, June, and July of 2020 at 124, 132, and 128. COVID-related articles varied across months, with the highest being in April (22) and the lowest in February (1), with the most current being 18 in July. All submissions during the study period are shown in Fig. 1 , with 2020 data shaded to show the proportion of COVID-related articles.

The data demonstrate that there was an 80.1% increase in manuscript submissions from 2017 to 2020, a 60.1% increase from 2018 to 2020 and a 39.2% increase between 2019 and 2020. Evidently, submissions in 2017, 2018, and 2019 were at markedly lower rates compared with 2020 manuscript submissions. The clearest examples of this rise in submissions in 2020 are found in May and July. In July, for instance, the number of submissions increased by 57.0% from 2019 to 2020.

A survey was conducted to evaluate the availability of Pediatric Research's editors to edit manuscripts during the pandemic. Of the 37 editors, only 1 editor said that they were unable to handle manuscripts at this time, while 1 editor said that they could handle more manuscripts. Three said they need to handle fewer manuscripts than they usually do, 17 said they can continue to handle the same number of manuscripts as normal, and 15 said they can continue to handle the same number of manuscripts as normal but needed more flexible deadlines. Based on the following responses, it can be concluded that most editors did not feel overwhelmed by the situation caused by the pandemic. Most feel able to handle the same load of manuscripts as they did prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.

A general trend of increase in submissions was observed every year (2017-2020) in average manuscript submissions. This can be attributed to Pediatric Research's growing popularity as a journal. COVID-19 did increase the total amount of submissions in COVIDaffected months (February-July 2020), but the increase was in addition to the pre-existing trend of increased manuscript submissions per year, prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.

Manuscript submission in May 2019 increased by 16.7% from May 2018; meanwhile, manuscript submission was 58.2% higher in May 2020 when compared to May 2019. Thus, from 2019 to 2020, there is an increase in submissions greater than the original trend of year-toyear manuscript submission increase, likely due in some part to COVID-19. This possibly COVID-caused trend from 2019 to 2020, however, is not consistent enough to draw conclusive results on how much working conditions under COVID-19, such as more time for researchers to stay home and write articles, added to the preexisting increase in manuscript submissions happening from 2017 to 2020. Additionally, since there was no consistent increase in COVIDrelated manuscript submissions, it was not possible to determine whether more manuscript submissions had occurred due to more data on the COVID-19 virus being collected by scientists.

In conclusion, our statistical analysis shows that manuscript submission was higher in February-July 2020 than in February-July 2017, 2018, and 2019. Despite the possible increase of manuscript submission that COVID-19 has caused, in addition to the year-to-year rise, COVID's effect was not considered significant or consistent enough to deduce a definitive causation for the 2020 manuscript submission increase. Our future approach into researching the pandemic's effect on manuscript submissions would be to study the number of submissions for the entirety of 2020, to research potential correlations between topic areas of submitted manuscripts and respective topic area's submission numbers, and to investigate the impact that article type (i.e., original research, correspondence, commentary, etc.) had on the increase in submissions.

N.B.A. and M.C.M. collected and organized data for the editorial, in addition to writing and revising its drafts. M.P.S. completed the statistical analysis, offered interpretation of the data, and provided corresponding write-ups. C.B. revised drafts, as well as provided guidance and final approval of the editorial to be published. 

R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing (R Foundation for Statistical Computing

An R Companion to Applied Regression 3rd edn

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Consent: There were no patients in this study, so no patient consent was required.Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.