COVID-19 has impacted both the real world, from economy to sports, and the research world. This study was a longitudinal and short-term scientometric analysis to investigate the changes in volume of published literature during the pandemic. The global efforts of scholars trying to understand the pandemic has in turn led to a significant overall increase in published literature, especially in the biomedical field. Access has also increased with databases and journals allowing free access to COVID-19-related literature. There was a surge of COVID-19-related publications in the first six months of the pandemic, specifically from peer-reviewed journals and preprint servers. Time to acceptance was significantly faster for COVID-19-related papers than others. Additionally, the top publishing countries have been consistently the same over the last five years as during the pandemic, but places with large outbreaks such as Italy, Brazil and Hong Kong also moved into the top 10 publishing countries during the pandemic. The mean number of international collaborations for COVID-19-related papers were greater (p<0.05) than for non-COVID-19-related papers. There is a need for more advanced analyses to understand trends that were not captured in this study and to further understand post-pandemic changes.