Has the COVID-19 pandemic had a positive impact on scientific production in medical education? A bibliometric analysis

Dear Editor,

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected international scientific production at all levels, in some countries there has been a decline on research, but in others, there has been a disproportionate increase in publications, related to the SARS-CoV-2 research.¹ However, the impact of the pandemic in terms of publication in medical education is unknown. Therefore, a bibliometric study was designed with the aim to characterizing pre- and post-pandemic medical education-related scientific production.

An observational, descriptive, cross-sectional bibliometric study was performed focusing on worldwide scientific production in medical education. SCOPUS database was used for retrieving information and the query equation was the following: ALL (Medical education OR medical students OR e-learning OR “medical simulation” OR “educacion medica”) AND (LIMIT-TO (PUBYEAR,2020) OR LIMIT-TO (PUBYEAR,2019)). All article types were included. Data were exported to Microsoft Excel® and then transferred to SPSS Version 15 programme for analysis.

During the period 1 January–31 December, 2019 (before pandemic), 62,409 documents were retrieved, 77.6% were original articles, 9.4% were reviews, 6.49% were conference papers and 2.65% were notes/letters. During the year 2020 (up to December 15), 74,451 global articles were found, 79.7% were original articles, 10.65% were reviews, 4.13% were conference papers and 3.45% were notes/letters. The number of papers has progressively increased over the months (r² = 0.809, p < 0.001).

The current study only isolated documents indexed in Scopus and has not identified all published materials and preprints. However, provides an initial snapshot of the impact of the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 infection on scientific production in medical education. The results suggest that with the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in the number of publications related to medical education, which could be related to the need for online and remote learning strategies in different educational, academic institutions and organizations in the world, as has been recently described.²

Conflicts of interest

None declared.

Funding

None declared.