The outliers will have an impact on the correlation coefficient. For e.g. let’s say there’s ‘patient temperature’ and '‘critical illness score’ which means how critical the patient is. Now consider the following values of x and y:
x : [96, 98, 99, 101, 110, 58, 65]
y : [0.1, 0.05, 0.3, 0.9, 0.4, 0.8, 0.95]
Clearly, when the temperature is 101 F, the patient is likely to be more critical. However, readings 110, 58 and 65 are ‘bad measured data’ where probably the temperature was not measured well. However, if all the data points are considered, then clearly temperature will not be correlated to the criticality of the patients.
Particularly when outliers are very far off from the magnitude of the good data, then the impact of outliers is huge.
So yes, consider removing outliers even before correlation analysis.