Impact of Covid-19 on Journal Impact Factor

Research related to COVID-19 has grown significantly in recent years and dominated health-related publications. Analysing the quality of COVID-19 research across journals, how the journals prioritised emerging topics, how their prominence has changed during this time etc. - are critical to understanding the scientific community, especially for prospective researchers and editors. Based on the scoring systems of the Impact Factor and its six years of data (2016-21) for 12,873 journals, this study explores how the journal’s impact was affected by COVID-19-related research. We examined the variability between non-pandemic periods and pandemic periods regarding the effect of COVID-19 on the growth of journal performance. The result indicates that journals with COVID-19-related publications show a significantly higher increase in their Impact Factor (IF) values and journals with lower IF values contributed most to this increase. Journals prioritising publishing COVID-19 research will likely experience increased visibility and IF growth in the long run.