Time to Publication in Medical Education Journals: An Analysis of Publication Timelines During COVID-19 (2019-2022)

Introduction: COVID-19 changed scholarly publishing. Yet, its impact on medical education publishing is unstudied. Because journal articles and their corresponding publication timelines can influence academic success, the field needs updated publication timelines to set evidence-based expectations for academic productivity. This study attempts to answer the following research questions: did publication timelines significantly change around the time of COVID-19 and, if so, how?

Methods: We conducted a bibliometric study; our sample included articles published between January 2018, and December 2022, that appeared in the Medical Education Journals List-24 (MEJ-24). We clustered articles into three time-based groups (pre-COVID, COVID-overlap, and COVID-endemic), and two subject-based groups (about COVID-19 and not about COVID-19). We downloaded each article's metadata from the National Library of Medicine and analyzed data using descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, and post-hoc tests to compare mean time differences across groups.

Results: Overall, time to publish averaged 300.8 days (SD = 200.8). One-way between-groups ANOVA showed significant differences between the three time-based groups F (2, 7473) = 2150.7, p < .001. The post-hoc comparisons indicated that COVID-overlap articles took significantly longer (n = 1470, M= 539; SD = 210.6) as compared to pre-COVID (n = 1281; M = 302; SD = 172.5) and COVID-endemic articles (n = 4725; M = 226; SD = 136.5). Notably, COVID-endemic articles were published in significantly less time than pre-pandemic articles, p < .001.

Discussion: Longer publication time was most pronounced for COVID-overlap articles. Publication timelines for COVID-endemic articles have shortened. Future research should explore how the shift in publication timelines has shaped medical education scholarship.