Disparities in the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on publishing: Evidence from submissions to Hormones and Behavior

Abstract

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The influence of the global COVID‐19 pandemic on manuscript submissions and editor and reviewer performance at six ecology journals

“…While it is too early to fully understand the effects of the pandemic on scholarly publishing, preliminary observations have suggested that submissions to journals have generally increased during the pandemic (Bell & Fong, 2020; Squazzoni et al, 2020), likely because many researchers lost access to their laboratories for some time and switched over to writing papers (Aubry et al, 2020). However, analyses of submissions to preprint servers (Cui et al, 2020; King & Frederickson, 2020; Viglione, 2020; Vincent‐Lamarre et al, 2020) and journals (Bell & Fong, 2020; Kibbe, 2020; McCormick, 2020; Muric et al, 2020; Shurchkov, 2020; Squazzoni et al, 2020; but see Dolan & Lawless, 2020) suggest that submissions from women have either grown less than those from men, or have even declined, though the magnitude and presence of the gender difference has varied among disciplines. A decrease in the proportion of submissions authored by women suggests that the productivity of female scholars has been more substantially impacted by pandemic disruptions, compared to the productivity of male scholars, likely because many communities have closed primary schools, childcare facilities, and other public and private institutions that help manage children (Alon et al., 2020).…”

Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women and Early Career Archaeologists

“…Despite the obvious effects on women and early career researchers, other studies have emphasized the long-term impacts on older adults, particularly through the creation of workforce bottlenecks with the delay in time to retirement preventing jobs opening up to new grad-uates [18]. Overall submissions to academic journals show declines in submissions by female authors [19,20]. Submissions across pre-print websites (e.g., bioRxiv) also show that women were submitting at a lower rate in the first two months of the pandemic than other groups [21].…”

Gender inequality in publishing during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns and social distancing policies most countries have implemented to try to curtail it, anecdotal (social media), submissions, and pre-print evidence has suggested that women in science have been submitting fewer manuscripts than their male counterparts (Cui et al, 2020; McCormick, 2020 , Viglione, 2020 ). Recently published articles and editorials from a handful of journals in the biological sciences now show that this gendered detrimental impact on publishing capacity is being reflected in peer reviewed publication rates in some journals as well ( Pinho-Gomes et al, 2020 ), although Neuropsychopharmacology had seen no change by June 2020 ( Jordan and Carlezon, 2020 ).…”