  A concern has been raised that "covidization" of research would cause an
overemphasizes on covid-19 and pandemics at the expense of other research. The
rapid growth of publications related to the Covid-19 pandemic renders a vast
amount of citations from this literature. This growth may affect bibliometric
indicators. In this paper I explored how the growth of covid-19 publications
influences bibliometric indicators commonly used in university rankings,
research evaluation and research allocation, namely the field normalized
citation score and the journal impact factor. I found that the burst of
publications in the early stage of the covid-19 pandemic affects
field-normalized citation scores and will affect the journal impact factor.
Publications unrelated to covid-19 are also heavily affected. I conclude that
there is a considerable risk to draw misleading conclusions from citation
indicators spanning over the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, in particular
when time series are used and when the biomedical literature is assessed.

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