Acceptance Times of Bibliometric Analyses on COVID-19 Literature

The present study aims to analyze the acceptance times of scientific papers presenting bibliometric analyses of COVID-19 literature published in the first phase of the pandemic. We collected the data from the Web of Science of Clarivate Analytics. The analysis considered various aspects of the papers and the published journals, such as document type, impact factor (IF) quartile rank of journals, and journal indexation. An initial search yielded 149 papers, 91 of which were selected for further analysis after excluding editorial materials and articles unrelated to COVID-19 and bibliometrics. We should have collected the required submission history information for fourteen of the 91 papers. The analysis revealed that acceptance times of bibliometric analyses on COVID-19 literature ranged between 1 and 238 days, with a median of 47 and a mean of 66.4 days. Most papers had shorter acceptance times than the mean, with only a few documents being accepted after a long wait. Journals without IF had lower acceptance times than those with IF, whereas journals with an IF between 2 and 2.99 had the most extended acceptance times; similarly, second- and fourth-quartile journals had a shorter acceptance time for papers than first- and third-quartile journals. Journals indexed in ESCI accepted documents in less time than journals indexed in other databases. In conclusion, scientific journals joined the rush to publish COVID-19-related research, as they shortened acceptance times for bibliometric analyses on COVID-19 literature published during the first phase of the pandemic compared to the period before the pandemic.