Massive covidization of research citations and the citation elite

Ioannidis, John P. A.; Bendavid, Eran; Salholz-Hillel, Maia; Boyack, Kevin W.; Baas, Jeroen

doi:10.1073/pnas.2204074119

Cited by 52 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Much research evidence is so methodologically problematic that it represents waste (Glasziou, Sanders & Hoffmann, 2020). It is unclear whether science writers can detect this efficiently in fields with massive production of papers (Ioannidis et al, 2021; Ioannidis et al, 2022). Importantly, journalistic papers in high impact scientific journals can be published within hours of having some new observation, preliminary data, or press release.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prolific non-research authors in high impact scientific journals: meta-research study

Ioannidis

2022

Preprint

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Journalistic papers published in high impact journals can be very influential, especially in hot fields. This meta-research analysis aimed to evaluate the publication profiles, impact, and disclosures of conflicts of interest of non-research authors who had published >200 Scopus-indexed papers in Nature, Science, PNAS, Cell, BMJ, Lancet, JAMA or New England Journal of Medicine. 154 prolific authors were identified, 148 of whom had published 67,825 papers in their main affiliated journal in a non-researcher capacity. Of 25 massively prolific authors with over 700 publications in one of these journals, only 3 had a PhD degree in any subject matter. Only 2 of the 25 disclosed potential conflicts with some specificity. The practice of assigning so much power to non-researchers in shaping scientific discourse should be further debated and disclosures of potential conflicts of interest should be emphasized.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prolific non-research authors in high impact scientific journals: meta-research study

Ioannidis

2022

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“…Fourth, we sampled from two recent years, 2019 and 2021, where 2021 is a unique pandemic year and therefore these numbers are possible to not reflect true yearly trends but mostly the covidization of science that has been observed across fields and disciplines and its repercussions (5,7,20,39). However, we did use a comparison focusing only on the non-COVID-19 papers in these two years.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The global burden of infectious disease has been large, with a higher share in less developed countries (1)(2)(3)(4). With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic the developed world was sensitized to the field with awakened interest and its funding and research output increased rapidly (5)(6)(7). The rigor and reliability of the evidence generated in the field of infectious diseases therefore has major implications for the health of individuals, populations, and societies at large.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More importantly, the COVID-19 pandemic was a crash test for many scientific fields, and most prominently this applied par excellence to the field of infectious diseases. Massive publication volume may not necessarily have been accompanied by high quality and/or transparency (5,14,15). It is important to study whether the infectious diseases literature published during the pandemic was different in this regard compared to the pre-pandemic papers published in the same journals that specialize on infectious diseases.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Transparency in infectious disease research: a meta-research survey of specialty journals

Zavalis

Contopoulos‐Ioannidis

Ioannidis

2022

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Introduction: Infectious diseases carry a large global burden and have implications for society at large. Therefore, reproducible, transparent research is extremely important. To assess the current state of transparency in this field, we investigated code sharing, data sharing, protocol registration, conflict of interest and funding disclosures in articles published in the most influential infectious disease journals. Methods: We evaluated transparency indicators in the 5340 PubMed Central Open Access (PMC OA) articles published in 2019 or 2021 in the 9 most-cited specialty journals in infectious disease. We used a previously validated text-mining R package, rtransparent. The approach was manually validated for a random sample of 200 articles for which study characteristics were also extracted in detail. Main comparisons assessed 2019 versus 2021 articles, 2019 versus 2021 non-COVID-19 articles, and 2021 non-COVID-19 articles versus 2021 COVID-19 articles. Results: A total of 5340 articles were evaluated (1860 published in 2019 and 3480 in 2021 (of which 1828 on COVID-19)). Text-mining identified code sharing in 98 (2%) articles, data sharing in 498 (9%), registration in 446 (8%), conflict of interest disclosures in 4209 (79%) and funding disclosures in 4866 (91%). There were substantial differences across the 9 journals in the proportion of articles fulfilling each transparency indicator: 1-9% for code sharing, 5-25% for data sharing, 1-31% for registration, 7-100% for conflicts of interest, and 65-100% for funding disclosures. There were no major differences between articles published in 2019 and non-COVID-19 articles in 2021. In 2021, non-COVID-19 articles had more data sharing (12%) than COVID-19 articles (4%). Validation-corrected imputed estimates were 3% for code sharing, 11% for data sharing, 8% for registrations, 79% for conflict of interest disclosures and 92% for funding disclosures. Conclusion: Data sharing, code sharing, and registration are very uncommon in infectious disease specialty journals. Increased transparency is required.

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“…The COVID-19 crisis has presented a major test for the scientific community and its research tools. With over 500,000 scientific papers already devoted to COVID-19 and over a million scientists likely involved in co-authoring them, no scientific field has been left untouched by the pandemic ( Ioannidis et al, 2022 ). All types of research designs, tools and practices have been utilized in response to this unprecedented global healthcare challenge, with mixed results.…”

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confidence: 99%