Covid-19 refereeing duration and impact-KKousha.xlsx

Two partly conflicting side-effects of the seriousness of the 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 for Covid-19 research were universal across major medical journals, and faster peer review associated with article impact in for the same papers. Based on 100 medical journals with the highest impact factors in the Web of Science, the results confirm that faster peer review for Covid-19 articles was universal, as was higher scholarly impact, whether assessed by Scopus citations or Mendeley readers. This is consistent with, but does not prove, faster Covid-19 peer review not tending to compromise quality.