Research quality suffered amid COVID-19 rush to publish, study shows

Lead author Michael Reade from the University of Queensland said they found that the rush to get information about the virus into the public domain saw the overall standard of research drop to concerning levels.

“There’s been a lot of commentary over the last few months that the quality of the medical literature decreased in the context of the pandemic, so we wanted to test that,” he said.

“We compared publications from the first five months of 2020 with the same period in 2019.

“There was obviously interest in COVID-19. People wanted to read about it so the journals wanted to publish, but there wasn’t time to enroll patients in randomised trials in the first few months so instead, there were lots of individual case reports and…