Pivot into COVID-19 research eases as publishing surge starts to level off

The lab run by John Schoggins at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center was one of the first to shift its attention to the crisis. He and his lab provided help to other scientists and physicians by testing human saliva for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as well as producing a few research papers.

In recent months, the lab has stopped working on COVID-19 because of the reduced severity of the Pandemic. With so many researchers piling into the field, Schoggins says, there was a sense of saturation.

Recent analyses of publishing trends suggest that Schoggins' lab is part of a wider pivot away from COVID-19 research. The number of papers related to the Pandemic is expected to decline this year after huge growth in 2020 and 2021. The proportion of new papers devoted to COVID-19 appears to be flattening out in key disciplines such as infectious diseases and public health. The decline in the share of COVID-19 papers suggests that researchers are returning to their core interests.

The research focus of most clinicians and epidemiologists is rightfully moving back towards their own interests now that many of the clinical and epidemiological knowledge gaps have been filled. There are many other priority killer diseases which have been neglected during the COVID-19 era that need attention.

There was a huge influx of scientists into related research. More than half a million articles and preprints related to the swine flu epidemic appeared as of April, according to an analysis of the database by Philip Shapira of the University of Manchester. The surge of papers on a new topic was unprecedented in the history of science, even though those publications make up just 4% or so of all scientific papers published. The shift in certain disciplines was dramatic. The analysis shows that the share of papers focused on coronaviruses and the diseases they cause went from 3% to 28%.

Some scientists are concerned about what they call the COVID-ization of research. Poor-quality studies are caused by too many researchers rushing into work outside of their expertise.

A recent analysis suggests that fears are valid. Dashun Wang and his colleagues reported in a preprint that two-thirds of authors who had at least one publication on COVID-19 in 2020 had no previous papers on a related topic.

The team found that the impact of papers published in 2020 on average was lower than the impact of papers published in the previous year. The group used a different metric to measure the novelty of a paper and found that it had a lower impact on their COVID-19 publications.

Some researchers are retreating because of the lower professional rewards. In most of the scientific fields he studied, the share of papers focused on COVID-19 continued to increase through early this year, but at a slower rate than in the previous year. Emergency medicine, pharmacology, and the study of the respiratory system are some of the fields where the share is dropping.

Jasper Fuk-Woo Chan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong, says that journal editors have become more choosey. He helps edit several journals and gets a lot of requests to review COVID-19 papers. He says journals published many papers at that time.

The value of the work done by scientists who jumped into COVID-19 research is not diminished by the easing of the publishing frenzy. The influx probably trained a whole set of researchers to think about public health and other aspects. There has been a human capital investment.

The consequences of the massive pivot could be mixed for early-career researchers. Funding and publishing opportunities were provided by the surge. Funding and enthusiasm for COVID-19 research may not be easy for them to adapt to.

A member of the search panel says that when the UT Southwestern Medical Center recently hired a number of assistant professors, close to half of the applicants had shifted into COVID-19 research and some had co-authored high-profile studies. Schoggins says that they were concerned about their future fundability and ability to make an impact.

Senior researchers who have studied COVID-19 might not be concerned about future fundability. Wang's literature analysis found that older scientists were more likely to pivot into such work in 2020. Wang speculated that senior scientists had the financial ability to jump into new lines of research because the papers often reported no grant support.

It could take several more years to figure out how many of the researchers are still alive. One scientist who plans to stay the course is Seema Lakdawala. She studied both types of Viruses before the Pandemic, and she expects to continue studying both types of Viruses after the Pandemic.

She is less worried about the pivot away from COVID-19 by some researchers than she is about the future of funding for such work. It is not hard to believe that this will happen again.