Publication Date:
2020-09-05
Description:
Background: The COVID 19 pandemic increased publication productivity enormously with numerous new COVID-19-related articles appearing daily, despite the fact that many health care workers in the partially overburdened national health care systems were faced with major challenges. Methods: In a cross-sectional, observational, retrospective study we compared and correlated 17 epidemiologic, health care system-related and health-economic factors from medical databases and intergovernmental organisations potentially influencing the COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 publication productivity between 1 January and 30 April 2020 amongst the 30 countries most severely affected by the pandemic. These factors were additionally correlated with the national pre-COVID-19 publication rate for the same pre-year period to identify potential changes in the general publication behaviour. Findings: COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 publication rates correlated strongest with access to and quality of health care (ρ = 0.80 and 0.87, p 〈 0.0001), COVID-19 cases per capita (ρ = 0.78 and 0.72, p 〈 0.0001), GDP per capita (ρ = 0.69 and 0.76, p 〈 0.0001), health spending per capita (ρ = 0.61 and 0.73, p 〈 0.0001) and the pre-COVID-19 Hirsch-Index (ρ = 0.61 and 0.62, p = 0.002 and
Electronic ISSN:
2079-7737
Topics:
Biology
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