Peer-reviewed publication is not only a scholarly endeavour; as academics, we strive to have a positive impact on people’s lives. That often starts with making sure our results and observations are noticed. Today’s scientific journals use elaborate metrics to track the dissemination of published research, not the least in support of their publishers’ bragging rights.
One of the most recent RECOVER19-funded articles, “A Global Index to Quantify Discrimination Resulting from COVID-19 Pandemic Response Policies” (Rinner et al. 2025), has already been viewed over 4,000 times according to the journal’s web site. Thanks to several high-profile social media accounts, this work featured as the most-viewed article of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health for much of the month of April. Among the 194 articles of Volume 22, Issue 4, it now ranks second-most viewed, with twice as many views as the third-most popular article and about ten times as many as the articles in the middle of the sorted list.
Another indicator of impact is the Altmetric score. Based on attention on Twitter/X and in two news outlets, our article features in the 94th percentile of over 28 million articles tracked by Altmetric, thus easily in the top 10%.
One of the news outlets that reported about the article was the French online tabloid France Soir. Their interest was triggered by the country’s rank as the second-most discriminatory country in the world according to our assessment of government response policies. Their article provided an excellent summary of our approach and the results of our global index. It also linked our work to questions and controversies about France’s Covid-19 measures that the newspaper previously took up.
Other RECOVER19-funded articles have also garnered large numbers of views on the respective journals’ homepages. For example, “a qualitative exploration of healthcare workers’ lived experience of the policy of vaccination mandates in Ontario” (Chaufan et al. 2025) is approaching 4,000 full-text views, about ten times as many as the second-most popular article and 20 to 30 times as many as most other articles in the June 2025 issue of the Journal of Public Health and Emergency.
Two project publications feature among their journals’ most-read articles. “A critical policy inquiry of vaccine mandates for healthcare workers” (Chaufan & Hemsing 2024) is currently in position 8 among AIMS Public Health’s most-read articles from 2023 and 2024. It also boasts a top-10% Altmetric score similar to the global discrimination index. And “COVID-19 vaccines and autoimmune disorders: A scoping review protocol” (Chaufan et al. 2023) is currently at the very top of the most-read leaderboard of AIMS Medical Science!
Overall, the list of RECOVER19-funded publications includes some ten peer-reviewed journal articles and seven other publications. In addition, we recently added a long list of about 25 articles and one book that were (co-)authored by RECOVER19 investigators during the project period, albeit not financially supported by the grant.
We should also mention citations by other researchers as a critically important measure of impact. Some of the project-related work has been cited 10, 20, 40, 50, or even over 90 times in just two years. We may devote a separate post on issues of peer review and research citation during the pandemic.
More work is currently under review or in progress, and we look forward to adding to our project and personal publication lists in support of a critical re-evaluation of the Covid-19 pandemic response.
RECOVER19 