This commentary critically examines how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped academic publishing practices, highlighting unintended consequences for research quality, researcher behavior, and reader engagement. While the rapid prioritization of coronavirus-related studies was initially justified by the urgent global health crisis, the manuscript argues that prolonged acceleration and preferential treatment may have distorted the scientific ecosystem.
A central concern raised is the topic-shifting phenomenon, whereby researchers outside core fields such as virology or epidemiology redirected their work toward COVID-19 to benefit from expedited review and publication processes. Although this surge increased the volume of pandemic-related literature, it also introduced variability in scientific rigor and relevance. Over time, such practices risk crowding out high-quality, expert-driven research and diluting the overall credibility of epidemic-focused scholarship.
The manuscript introduces the concept of “coronavirus blindness,” drawing an analogy to banner blindness in behavioral psychology. Just as users learn to ignore visually prominent but low-value advertisements, excessive exposure to pandemic-related publications may lead researchers, reviewers, and readers to disengage from COVID-19 content altogether. This desensitization poses a paradox: even rigorous and clinically meaningful studies may receive less attention simply because they are embedded in an oversaturated information environment.
Beyond academic publishing, the commentary also touches on psychological consequences of information overload. Continuous exposure to pandemic-related narratives may exacerbate anxiety or contribute to maladaptive coping mechanisms, including conspiracy beliefs or denial of disease severity. This highlights how scientific communication does not occur in a psychological vacuum but interacts with broader cognitive and emotional processes.
Importantly, the article does not argue against accelerated publishing per se, but rather emphasizes the necessity of maintaining publication ethics and quality thresholds, even during global emergencies. The prolonged prioritization of a single research theme may inadvertently suppress innovation in other critical medical and scientific domains, while also undermining trust in epidemic-related research.
Overall, this commentary contributes a meta-scientific perspective on pandemic-era publishing, urging journals to balance urgency with rigor and novelty with relevance. By calling for heightened editorial scrutiny and awareness of “coronavirus blindness,” the manuscript underscores the responsibility of journals to safeguard scientific integrity and ensure that crisis-driven publishing does not compromise long-term scholarly value.
link of paper:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9026955/
doi: 10.1016/j.hlpt.2022.100625
cite:
