The “Infodemic” of Journal Publication Associated with the Novel Coronavirus Disease

How fast is the peer-review process for orthopaedic publications related to the Covid-19 pandemic?

“…China came as the lead country in publications counts, followed by the United States and the United Kingdom. 3 Although our study concentrated on the orthopaedic related publications, we noticed the same diversity noticed by the previous study, with 48 countries contributing to the publications with the United States representing the leading country, followed by Italy and India. The publications were published in 78 unique journals, the low number of journals compared to the previous study explained by the selectivity (one specialty) in the search terms in the current study.…”

“…In the current study, we found that review articles represented the majority of published articles (51%); the same finding was reported by Gazendam et al where they found that the most common publication types were commentaries and narrative reviews, forming about (63.4%) of all publications, while original articles accounted for (30.6%). 3 The same finding was reported as well in the study by Kambhampati SBS et al 2 The trend that reviews were the most published compared to original articles can be explained by the novelty of the condition with a limited time to design, execute, and publish a clinically driven article. 3 The essence of the rigorous peer-review process is to catch the misconduct and shortcomings of scientific articles before and not after it being published; it is considered as the foundation for the integrity of scientific findings in the medical field.…”

“…The fast spread of the pandemic among different countries seemed to have its implication on social media as well as medical journals. 3 As many journals rushed into publishing articles related Fig. 1.…”

“…1 The most concerning issue of the rush and racing in scientific publications on the newly experienced pandemic resides in the potential for "misinformation" or "disinformation," which may be caused by expressing false or misleading claims combined with a deficiency in the reviewing process, which is considered as the information checkpoint before it gets published to the public. 3,5 This concern was confirmed in a study by Yeo-Teh and Tang where they found that the retraction rate of Covid-19 related articles (since the start of the disease) exceeds the rates of cancer and immunology related articles retraction rates, a prominent example was the article written on the role of antimalarial drugs in the management of Covid-19 patients which was published in The Lancet on May 22nd and retracted on June 4th. They mentioned that one of the possible causes of an increased rate of retraction is the "shallowness" of the peer review process.…”

“…1e4 Gazendam et al used the term "infodemic" to describe the "plethora" of publications related to the Covid-19 pandemic, The WHO warned about this "infodemic" phenomenon concerning news and social media; however, it seems that this phenomenon found its way to the scientific writing as well. 3 Kambhampati SBS et al studied the expansion of medical literature publication numbers on Covid-19 in April 2020 and found that the average number of daily publications ranges from 34.8 to 58.9 articles per day. 2 In another study by Yeo-Teh and Tang carried in June 2020, they found that the average rate was 137 papers per day.…”