Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact

Two partly conflicting academic pressures from the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic are the need for faster peer review of Covid-19 health-related research and greater scrutiny of its findings. This paper investigates whether decreases in peer review durations for Covid-19 articles were universal across 97 major medical journals and 3 relevant leading journals publishing Covid-19 research. The results suggest that on average, Covid-19 articles submitted during 2020 were reviewed 1.7-2.1 times faster than non-Covid-19 articles submitted during 2017-2020. Nevertheless, the review speed of Covid-19 research had reduced over time and was much faster (1.9-3.4 times) throughout the first five months of the pandemic during January to May 2020 and no significant differences found between reviewing speed of Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles submitted during November-December 2020.The that faster peer review associates with higher citation impact for Covid-19 articles in the same journals, suggesting that faster Covid-19 peer review does not usually compromise the scholarly impact of important Covid-19 research.