Was the number of submissions to scholarly journals in Korea affected by the COVID-19 pandemic?

This study investigated whether there was an increase in submissions to scholarly journals in Korea according to journals’ field and indexation status in Scopus or Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) in 2020, the year when the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic first spread throughout the world. The analysis included 60 journals with esubmission systems operated by M2PI. Yearly and monthly submissions were counted from 2016 to 2020. The yearly proportional change was also calculated. In 2020, submissions soared for medical journals indexed in Scopus/SCIE (49.5%), corresponding to an increase of 36.9% relative to the expected number of submissions. There was also a surge of submissions to these journals from March to July 2020. However, non-medical journals and medical journals not indexed in Scopus/SCIE did not show an increase in submissions. The number of submissions to scholarly journals in Korea was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in a specific subset of journals. The background of the spike in submissions is required to be re-investigated. Editors’ burden also should be mitigated through editorial board members’ help and publishers’ support.