  In recent months the COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2 and Coronavirus)
pandemic has spread throughout the world. In parallel, extensive scholarly
research regarding various aspects of the pandemic has been published. In this
work, we analyse the changes in biomedical publishing patterns due to the
pandemic. We study the changes in the volume of publications in both peer
reviewed journals and preprint servers, average time to acceptance of papers
submitted to biomedical journals, international (co-)authorship of these papers
(expressed by diversity and volume), and the possible association between
journal metrics and said changes. We study these possible changes using two
approaches: a short-term analysis through which changes during the first six
months of the outbreak are examined for both COVID-19 related papers and
non-COVID-19 related papers; and a longitudinal approach through which changes
are examined in comparison to the previous four years. Our results show that
the pandemic has so far had a tremendous effect on all examined accounts of
scholarly publications: A sharp increase in publication volume has been
witnessed and it can be almost entirely attributed to the pandemic; a
significantly faster mean time to acceptance for COVID-19 papers is apparent,
and it has (partially) come at the expense of non-COVID-19 papers; and a
significant reduction in international collaboration for COVID-19 papers has
also been identified. As the pandemic continues to spread, these changes may
cause a slow down in research in non-COVID-19 biomedical fields and bring about
a lower rate of international collaboration.
