Does Covid-19 Change the Direction of Citation Impact and Social Impact of Research Articles?

Financial constraints to support research in many countries, including Iran, have led to a critical look at methods of measuring the effectiveness of research. Today, relying solely on citation impact to measure research productivity is not justified for funding organizations. Institutions pay more attention on understanding of the extent their research has been able to meet the needs of society and solve existing problems (1). Therefore, organizations seek to find more comprehensive tools and methods to measure the impact of research that is not necessarily the frequency of citation. Because the use of the whole society such as professionals, doctors, educators and the general public from the research work is ignored, at the expense of the limited community of "other researchers" as long as citation impact is used for measuring the impact of the research (2,3). In addition, other proposed methods for measuring impact of research on industry, patent, quality of life, economy and trade market is encountered with suspicion due to delay between research conduction and use of research in products, processes and practices