(179) Pandemic-Provoked Pulls and Pivots in Pharmacy Practice Publications

Objective : To determine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected scholarly activity, scholarly output, and research focus of pharmacy practice faculty from the top 50 NIH-funded schools of pharmacy (SOPs).

Methods: SOPs were included if they appeared on the NIH funding list during all four index years (2018-2019: pre-pandemic and 2020-2021: pandemic) and ranked among the top 50 in one or more years. Pharmacy practice faculty names were obtained from the AACP directory. The publication records of each SOP were obtained from Scopus. Outcome measures included scholarly activity (proportion of faculty members who published) and output (number of documents published). Data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel, VOSviewer®, and Python. Statistical analysis was done in R using a mixed effects model, in which the pandemic periods and SOPs’ geographical regions were fixed effects, and SOPs were the random effects.

Results: Fifty-six SOPs and 1,359 faculty members were included. Documents published were 2,764 and 3,009 before and during the pandemic, respectively (8.9% increase). There were no effects of the pandemic nor SOPs’ regions on scholarly activity. However, both variables significantly affected scholarly output, with the overall higher output during the pandemic driven solely by the Midwest region. COVID-19 emerged as the top new research trend, constituting 4.6% of pandemic period publications and 56.7% (139/245) of the increase over the pre-pandemic period. Of these COVID-19 publications, 21% were education-focused.

Conclusions: The pandemic did not affect scholarly activity across regions. Although scholarly output increased overall during the pandemic, there was an apparent downward pull, as the marginal increase observed was lower than the expected biennial increase in scholarly output. Pharmacy practice faculty pivoted towards COVID-19 research and publications, the majority of which was presumably clinical.