Geoscience Authors and Reviewers during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Demographic Analysis of AGU's Authors and Peer Reviewers

<p>The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work and live, and as of January 2020, the increase in cases and the initiation of the vaccine introduces even more uncertainty into the short-term future. With an increase in domestic responsibilities for many people, there is a heighted concern about the productivity of the Earth and space science research community, and especially the impact on student, early career researchers, and women. AGU's rich data has allowed us to investigate how the pandemic has affected our constituents, and in a poster presented at AGU 2020, we showed that submissions increased in 2020 with the same proportion of women submitting in 2020 and little monthly variation. Submissions from men and women in their 20s decreased in 2020 compared to 2019, while submissions from women in their 30s and 50s and men in their 40s increased. &#160;We saw minor monthly fluctuations in submissions by the country-region of submitting author, with an increase in total and proportional submissions from China continuing from 2019. Additionally, our editors were concerned about the time the most affected scientists could devote to research and peer reviewing. This analysis seeks to update demographics of submitting authors with Q1 2021 data and introduce an analysis of the effect the pandemic had on our article peer reviewers. Preliminary analysis shows very little difference in the invite rates of women in 2020 compared to 2019 (+1%), and only a 0.4% decrease in women's accept to review rates in 2020 compared to 2019. We also only see slight monthly fluctuations in invite and review accept rates. Invitations to review by country of reviewer are proportionally similar in 2020 to those in 2019. This analysis will also investigate any changes in invited and agreed reviewer age to see how the pandemic may have influenced those likely to have research, teaching, and family commitments.</p>