A concern has been raised that "covidization" of research would cause an overemphasizes on covid-19 and pandemics at the expense of other research. The rapid growth of publications related to the Covid-19 pandemic renders a vast amount of citations from this literature. This growth may affect bibliometric indicators. In this paper I explored how the growth of covid-19 publications influences bibliometric indicators commonly used in university rankings, research evaluation and research allocation, namely the field normalized citation score and the journal impact factor. I found that the burst of publications in the early stage of the covid-19 pandemic affects field-normalized citation scores and will affect the journal impact factor. Publications unrelated to covid-19 are also heavily affected. I conclude that there is a considerable risk to draw misleading conclusions from citation indicators spanning over the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, in particular when time series are used and when the biomedical literature is assessed.
翻译:有人担心,研究的“选择性化”会以牺牲其他研究为代价,过度强调同源19和流行病。与Covid-19大流行有关的出版物的迅速增长使得从这一文献中引出大量引文。这种增长可能会影响生物计量指标。在本文中,我探讨了同源19出版物的增长如何影响大学排名、研究评价和研究分配中常用的比值指标,即正常引用评分和日记影响因素。我发现,在同源19大流行的早期阶段,出版物的暴发影响到外地正常引用得分,并将影响日记的影响因素。与同源19大流行无关的出版物也受到严重影响。我的结论是,从贯穿于同源19大流行开始的引用指标中得出误导性结论的风险很大,特别是在使用时间序列和评估生物医学文献时。