I noticed a strange anti-correlation.
1) in times of COVID-19 most experimentalists are either banned from entering their labs or is their experimental work reduced to a couple of hours per week or month, due to sanitary measures.
2) Production of scientific manuscripts has skyrocketed - all major journals are experiencing an unpreceeded inflow rate of manuscripts that they can only handle by employing an extreme immediate rejection probability.
How to explain the phenomenon that less experimental work leads to a higher production of results? Would it not hint our employers to reduce our funding (less funding - more finding)?
Or is this happening because we are constantly pressured to produce ever higher number of papers for purpose of career advance so, not having anything else to do at our homes, we finally have time to analyze thoroughly our experimental results and write papers "undisturbed" by pressure of experimental research?
Or is simply the (partial) work from home, where we do not lose hours of time and distraction go get to work and back to home, where we do not suffer idiotic administrative work and unwanted but necessary physical interactions with all kinds of colleagues that only eat our time and focus on our work and where boundary between free time and work is erased, is simply more efficient (but for how long without taking a health toll!)?
Well,the lockdown period and working from home has given researchers the opportunity to critically analyse and put together some experimental findings and results that were not converted to research articles before the beginning of lockdown
Some studies have been conducted right before the lockdown but due to distractions and busy schedules at work, those experimental findings were not put together, I think researchers are now falling back to those results to bring tangible write-ups from it
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