The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread globally with substantial health and socioeconomic impacts. The scientific community has timely responded to this global crisis by launching calls for COVID-19 research and prioritizing their publications. Journals have accelerated the peer-review process to ensure rapid dissemination of the findings and therefore have received an overwhelming number of papers on the COVID-19 pandemic. A PubMed-based search identified more than 100,000 COVID-19 articles published in 2020, leading to a ∼10% increase in the total publication numbers over 2019 [1].
