The COVID-19 pandemic has generated an unprecedented global scientific effort to provide swift answers to pressing health needs. While many hospitals turned into almost exclusive COVID-19 centres during part of the pandemic; funding bodies, research offices, drug agencies, ethical committees, health authorities, and editorial boards of scientific journals prioritized COVID-19 related projects and articles. This contributed to the generation of a vast volume of scientific material. However, the rush to characterise this new disease since the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China has led to issues with ethical and scientific rigour aspects [1–4].
