The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on school-level scholarly outcomes and research focus of pharmacy practice faculty

Introduction The effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on scholarly outcomes and research focus of schools of pharmacy (SOPs) have not been studied.Objectives To determine how objective measures of scholarly outcomes and research focus changed in pharmacy practice among SOPs, within geographic regions, during the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods SOPs were included if they appeared on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding list in all four index years (2018-2019: pre-pandemic and 2020-2021: pandemic) and ranked among the top 50 at least once between 2018 and 2021. Names of pharmacy practice faculty were obtained from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) directory. The publication records of each SOP were obtained from Scopus. Scholarly outcome measures were scholarly activity ratio (SAR; proportion of faculty members who published) and scholarly output (SO; number of documents published). Data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel, VOSviewer (R), and Python. Statistical analysis was done in R using a mixed effects model, with the pandemic and geographic regions as fixed effects, and SOPs as the random effect.Results Fifty-five SOPs and 1343 faculty members were included. Neither the pandemic nor geographic region had significant effects on SAR. However, both variables had significant effects on SO, as demonstrated by an increase in the Midwest during the pandemic (p < 0.05). Documents published increased from 2755 to 3001 during the pandemic. This 8.9% increase was lower than a historical average biennial increase of 24.9%. COVID-19 was the top new research topic, constituting 56.5% of the increase over the pre-pandemic period. Of these COVID-19 publications, 20.9% were education-related.Conclusion Pharmacy practice faculty engaged in COVID-19 research that focused predominantly on education. Scholarly-active faculty were resilient, but their output was lower than expected based on historical trends. These results support the need to adjust tenure and promotion benchmarks and/or timelines related to scholarly output, especially for tenure-track faculty with probationary periods spanning these pandemic years.