Publications during COVID-19 times: An unexpected overall increase

The goal of this investigation is to find out the role of external influences, such as COVID-19, on research production. We used the Web of Science to collect data and compared expected data, based on past performance, with actually observed data. We observed that the number of articles and reviews, published in 2021, has increased, even more than we expected. This increase is the largest for the broad category of life sciences and biomedicine. We studied this issue also for the USA and China separately and for the collaboration between these two countries. Here, we observed a huge decline in the collaboration between China and the USA. This observation points to another external influence on research productivity, namely geopolitical tensions that arose between these two research giants. We consider our study as a contribution to the science of science. Major limitations are the facts that we only used one database, restricted ourselves to normal articles and reviews, using whole counting, and studying one particular year.