{"doi":"10.1098/rsos.210389","title":"The rapid, massive growth of COVID-19 authors in the scientific literature","abstract":"We examined the extent to which the scientific workforce in different fields was engaged in publishing COVID-19-related papers. According to Scopus (data cut, 1 August 2021), 210 183 COVID-19-related publications included 720 801 unique authors, of which 360 005 authors had published at least five full papers in their career and 23 520 authors were at the top 2% of their scientific subfield based on a career-long composite citation indicator. The growth of COVID-19 authors was far more rapid and massive compared with cohorts of authors historically publishing on H1N1, Zika, Ebola, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. All 174 scientific subfields had some specialists who had published on COVID-19. In 109 of the 174 subfields of science, at least one in 10 active, influential (top 2% composite citation indicator) authors in the subfield had authored something on COVID-19. Fifty-three hyper-prolific authors had already at least 60 (and up to 227) COVID-19 publications each. Among the 300 authors with the highest composite citation indicator for their COVID-19 publications, most common countries were USA (<i>n</i> = 67), China (<i>n</i> = 52), UK (<i>n</i> = 32) and Italy (<i>n</i> = 18). The rapid and massive involvement of the scientific workforce in COVID-19-related work is unprecedented and creates opportunities and challenges. There is evidence for hyper-prolific productivity.","journal":"Royal Society Open Science","year":2021,"id":10235,"datarank":5.802474328287985,"base_score":4.574710978503383,"endowment":4.574710978503383,"self_citation_contribution":0.6862066467755076,"citation_network_contribution":5.116267681512478,"self_endowment_contribution":0.6862066467755076,"citer_contribution":5.116267681512478,"corpus_percentile":72.6606997558991,"corpus_rank":337,"citation_count":99,"citer_count":84,"citers_with_citation_signal":61,"citers_with_endowment":61,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":true,"is_dataset_confidence":0.7157,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-09-01","algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":7559,"name":"Maia Salholz-Hillel","orcid":"0000-0003-1934-9504","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":5151,"name":"Kevin W. Boyack","orcid":"0000-0001-7814-8951","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":11483,"name":"Jeroen Baas","orcid":"0000-0001-8005-4153","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":148,"name":"John P. A. Ioannidis","orcid":"0000-0003-3118-6859","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":42,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}