The first 10 000 COVID-19 papers in perspective: are we publishing what we should be publishing?

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented focus of the world’s scientific community on one topic. To quantify, we have calculated that 4% of all scientific outputs during the last 5 months have been about COVID-19; this has increased from 0.3% in February, to 1.2% in March, 4.5% in April, 6.5% in May, 8.3% in June and 6.6% in July. We systematically retrieved and critically assessed the first 10 000 PubMed indexed papers on COVID-19. They were published between 20 January and 7 May 2020, with an average of nearly 100 new papers added every day, published in 1881 different scientific journals. Fewer than 8% of journals have published half of the total production, and 7 journals alone have indexed more than 100 papers each. By contrast, 43.3% of journals only published one paper on COVID-19. Unsurprisingly, the largest amount of papers, one-fourth of the 10,000, were published in the USA, the country with the largest COVID-19 burden and ranking first in the 2019 Nature Index for quality research,1 followed by China (22.2%), Italy (9%), the UK (7.6%) and France (3.2%). This surge of publications that has emerged during the current pandemic suggests that it is important to take a step back and ask two key questions. First, are we publishing what we should be publishing? Second, are we publishing the way we should be publishing?