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

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, and government policies attempting to slow the spread, has affected many aspects of both our personal and professional lives. University research laboratories in much of the world were shut down starting in March 2020, with the research community shifting to working from home. Though many universities have allowed researchers to partially resume onsite activities, ongoing restrictions continue to affect how many of us work. This has impacted, and will continue to impact, our research output. Scholarly publishing is an important aspect of that output for many in, and out, of academia. While it is too early to fully understand the effects of the pandemic on scholarly publishing, preliminary observations have suggested that

Gender gap in journal submissions and peer review during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A study on 2329 Elsevier journals

“…In this context, journals and publishers should increase their usual effort in internal assessment and monitoring with a special focus on the consequences of the pandemic on research [ 23 , 46 ]. This study has paved the way for large-scale collaboration initiatives on data sharing between publishers and the scientific community [ 39 ] and could be used as a template to map the evolution of the pandemic science.…”

“…While a study on American Journal of Public Health confirmed that submissions were higher from men [ 21 ], other studies in specific fields reported no trace of gender inequality in the proportion of submissions [ 22 ]. For instance, a study on the impact of the pandemic on six journals published by the British Ecological Society (BES) found that the proportion of submissions authored by women during the COVID period of 2020 did not change relative to the same period in 2019 [ 23 ].…”

“…This allowed us to treat the pandemic as a ‘quasi-experiment’ and estimate its effect on academics’ productivity at an individual level, by considering the seasonal rate of submissions in 2018–2020 in different research areas and residential countries. Unlike other studies, which looked at the gender proportion either of preprint or publication authors or submission authors [ 23 ], we examined the effect of the pandemic on each scholar active between 2018–2020 in these journal submission databases at the individual level. Furthermore, we included data on referees to understand whether women were penalized in their capacity to serve the community and influence the type of research performed during the pandemic.…”

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

“…In early 2020, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the novel 2019 coronavirus (COVID- 19), began to spread in the United States, causing alarm in the public health sectors. By mid-March 2020, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global pandemic [1] and many non-essential professions instituted work-from-home mandates.…”

“…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].…”