Publish or perish: Panic publishing a danger to science during COVID-19

To the Editor

When we are writing this letter, there are 79,255 papers published with the search term of COVID-19 in the PubMed portal in the last year. There are around 3000 papers published with ‘COVID and Psychiatry’ in the last 1 year. Most of the journals are fast-tracking the publishing, often skipping the peer review process during the COVID era. There are thousands of surveys related to COVID and psychiatry coming to participate almost every day. We wonder whether half of them have gone through any ethical process at all. Most of the journals are opening their special section on COVID even if it is not directly related to their field. Many hypotheses are published, which are totally unrelated to COVID or might be a natural occurrence such as various skin diseases due to significant stress rather than COVID per se.

There is another phenomenon where mostly junior scientists are taking a shortcut route to publish whatever comes to their mind relating to COVID, to increase the numbers, which is similar to the analogy of ‘publish or perish’ (Rawat and Meena, 2014). On the other side, the journal editors are keen on publishing everything, sometimes even similar topics on different versions, to increase their citation score. This might pose a danger to science as the journals are changing their priorities to publish COVID-related topics instead of many other essential subjects requiring ongoing attention. The COVID might stay for another few years, which should not delay the progress in other science fields due to excessive attention to one single infectious disease. It can also dilute real evidence when researchers plan to write a meta-analysis on some topics on SARS-CoV-2.

It has already proliferated the number of predatory journals and publishers (Das and Chatterjee, 2017; Manca et al., 2020). It is high time that editors should start focusing on the quality of papers rather than publishing anything or everything on COVID. Junior researchers should focus on publishing what is essential or innovative rather than increasing papers’ numbers. There is a need for ongoing reflection on what pathways science is going towards as false evidence can be much more harmful than no evidence.