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By auditing the complete set of COVID-19-related publications in the Web of Science, we reveal here that COVID-19-related research worsened the polarization of academic journals: The IF before the pandemic was proportional to the increment of IF, which had the effect of increasing inequality while retaining the journal rankings. We also found that the most highly cited studies related to COVID-19 were published in prestigious journals at the onset of the epidemic. Through the present quantitative investigation, our findings caution against the belief that quantitative metrics, particularly IF, can indicate the significance of individual papers. 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