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The impact of COVID‐19 has underlined the need for reliable information to guide clinical practice and policy. This urgency has to be balanced against disruption to journal handling capacity and the continued need to ensure scientific rigour. We examined the reporting quality of highly disseminated COVID‐19 research papers using a bibliometric analysis examining reporting quality and risk of bias (RoB) amongst 250 top scoring Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) COVID‐19 research papers between January and April 2020. Method‐specific RoB tools were used to assess quality. After exclusions, 84 studies from 44 journals were included. Forty‐three (51%) were case series/studies, and only one was an randomized controlled trial. Most authors were from institutions based in China (n = 44, 52%). The median AAS and impact factor was 2015 (interquartile range [IQR] 1,105–4,051.5) and 12.8 (IQR 5–44.2) respectively. Nine studies (11%) utilized a formal reporting framework, 62 (74%) included a funding statement, and 41 (49%) were at high RoB. This review of the most widely disseminated COVID‐19 studies highlights a preponderance of low‐quality case series with few research papers adhering to good standards of reporting. It emphasizes the need for cautious interpretation of research and the increasingly vital responsibility that journals have in ensuring high‐quality publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the pattens of international collaboration by analysing publications on COVID‐19 published in the first 6 months of the pandemic. The data set comprised articles on COVID‐19 indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) downloaded four times between 1 April 2020 and 1 June 2020. The analysis of 5,827 documents revealed that 128 countries, 23,127 authors, and 6,349 institutes published on the pandemic. The data reveal that the three main publishing countries were the USA, China, and England with Italy closely following. Although publication was widely spread, most of the institutions with the highest volume of output were in China. Network analysis showed growth in international cooperation with an average degree of country/region cooperation rising to 23.06 by 1 June. There was also a clear core‐periphery structure to international collaboration. Institutional collaboration was shown to be highly regionalized. The data reveal a high and growing incidence of international collaboration on the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]