 The study aimed to compare the productivity trends and scholarly impact of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 literature across three consecutive calendar years using six high-impact medical journals. The results showed a significant increase in if change for manuscripts including COVID-19, with highly cited publications being more likely in these manuscripts. However, the study also highlighted that inflated IFs create ambiguity as benchmark tools for assessing scholarly impact and may incentivize authors to exploit the publication process. This article was authored by Arestes de Lardes and Panayotis Giannos.