The Covid-19 backlog in academia

There is not just a massive Covid-19 backlog in NHS care in the UK, there is also a backlog in academic publications in this country, albeit one which is fortunately much less noticeable to the outside world. And hopefully nobody is going to die because of it. Of course I can only talk about my own experience and anecdotal evidence from friends and colleagues because I don’t have any hard data on this, but it would also be a surprise if academia had not been affected.

Looking through my publications list, there is a noticeable gap in 2020 where I did not publish anything except my latest monograph – and that had been in the making for years and only came out at the very end of the year. In 2021, I only published one book review, and in 2022 one journal article and one review. The following year was no better with another article and another review, even though it felt at the time as if I had been constantly working. Admittedly, some of this work was probably done on an edited collection I was preparing with a colleague, and which is due out next month. However, there are quite a lot of book chapters and a couple of book reviews still in the pipeline all promising to be “forthcoming” at some unspecified point in the future.

I would venture to guess that most of these yet to be published pieces got somehow caught up in the matrix of Covid academia when people could not go to work, had to look after children and vulnerable family memebers, meetings were cancelled or moved online, and some of us were simply sick ourselves or too distracted, depressed or isolated to focus on anything other than surviving the pandemic. Of course, there is also the tiny little matter of online teaching quite a few colleagues might have had to deal with which sucked up all the time and energy that would normally have gone into research and publications and that too often went unrecognised by university administrations failing to offer adequate support to their staff, yet still haggling over meagre pay rises in the recent industrial disputes.

I also wonder what effect this backlog might have had on the publications themselves. Will they be more thoroughly researched and beautifully written because they took so much more time to prepare? Or will they be hastily assembled because there was never quite enough time? And will a lot of the material due to appear be hopelessly out of date, because of long gaps between submission and publication? The answer is: I do not know. The only thing I know is that – now the pandemic is over – there will soon be a flurry of publications we have all been waiting for and none of us will have time to read them.

gm