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Short abstract:

Against the background of changes in knowledge production and dissemination during the pandemic, we elaborate on how biomedical researchers (e)valuated the quality of this knowledge and discuss which notions of quality emerge in this process.

Long abstract:

The question of the quality of scientific knowledge on COVID-19 became particularly relevant for biomedical researchers during the pandemic. In light of pandemic-related changes in the scientific enterprise - above all the high speed and number of new publications, the partial suspension of peer review, the increasing importance of preprint, and the influx of new researchers from other disciplines entering into the field - the reliability of new knowledge on COVID-19 become increasingly questioned by researchers, especially in the acute phase at the beginning of the pandemic. In this paper, we focus on how researchers questioned the quality of this knowledge and which ideas of quality emerged in these evaluation processes.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with biomedical researchers from the fields of virology, epidemiology, hygiene and other areas of infection research, we elaborate on how researchers (e)valuated scientific knowledge about COVID-19 during the pandemic and how they dealt with uncertain knowledge. Our paper shows how researchers performed both processes of de- and re-stabilization of knowledge on COVID-19. Here, the pandemic-induced changes in the production and dissemination of knowledge led to significant disruptions in the common routines of evaluating new knowledge, whereby researchers questioned its reliability for their scientific practice. In response, researchers developed individual, collective, and institutional practices that attempted to secure knowledge. In doing so, we show which quality criteria become significant in this re-evaluation process of knowledge claims and discuss their relevance for scientific research within the pandemic context (and beyond).