  'Publish or perish' is an expression describing the pressure on academics to
consistently publish research to ensure a successful career in academia. With a
global pandemic that has changed the world, how has it changed academic
productivity? Here we show that academics are posting just as many publications
on the arXiv pre-print server as if there were no pandemic: 168,630 were posted
in 2020, a +12.6% change from 2019 and $+1.4\sigma$ deviation above the
predicted 162,577 $\pm$ 4,393. However, some immediate impacts are visible in
individual research fields. Conference cancellations have led to sharp drops in
pre-prints, but laboratory closures have had mixed effects. Only some
experimental fields show mild declines in outputs, with most being consistent
on previous years or even increasing above model expectations. The most
significant change is a 50% increase ($+8\sigma$) in quantitative biology
research, all related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these publications are
by biologists using arXiv for the first time, and some are written by
researchers from other fields (e.g., physicists, mathematicians). While
quantitative biology pre-prints have returned to pre-pandemic levels, 20% of
the research in this field is now focussed on the COVID-19 pandemic,
demonstrating a strong shift in research focus.
