The relationship between bioRxiv preprints, citations and altmetrics

Abstract

A potential motivation for scientists to deposit their scientific work as preprints is to enhance its citation or social impact. In this study we assessed the citation and altmetric advantage of bioRxiv, a preprint server for the biological sciences. We retrieved metadata of all bioRxiv preprints deposited between November 2013 and December 2017, and matched them to articles that were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. Citation data from Scopus and altmetric data from Altmetric.com were used to compare citation and online sharing behavior of bioRxiv preprints, their related journal articles, and nondeposited articles published in the same journals. We found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles had sizably higher citation and altmetric counts compared to nondeposited articles. Regression analysis reveals that this advantage is not explained by multiple explanatory variables related to the articles’ publication venues and authorship. Further research will be required to establish whether such an effect is causal in nature. bioRxiv preprints themselves are being directly cited in journal articles, regardless of whether the preprint has subsequently been published in a journal. bioRxiv preprints are also shared widely on Twitter and in blogs, but remain relatively scarce in mainstream media and Wikipedia articles, in comparison to peer-reviewed journal articles.

Preprinting the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Usage of preprint servers within the biological sciences has been rising since the inception of bioRxiv and other platforms [10,27]. The urgent health threat of a global pandemic has catapulted the use of preprint servers as a means of quickly disseminating scientific findings into the public sphere, encouraged by funding bodies requiring COVID-19 research to be open access [18,20].…”

International authorship and collaboration across bioRxiv preprints

“…Our study represents the first comprehensive, country-level analysis of bioRxiv preprint publication and outcomes. While previous studies have split up papers into “USA” and “everyone else” categories in biology (Fraser et al 2020) and astrophysics (Schwarz and Kennicutt 2004), our results provide a broad picture of worldwide participation in the largest preprint server in biology. We show that the United States is by far the most highly represented country by number of preprints, followed distantly by the United Kingdom and Germany.…”

“…However, it is also possible, if not likely, that the publication of many preprints goes undetected by its system. Fraser et al (2020) developed a method of searching for published preprints in Scopus and Crossref databases and found most had already been picked up by bioRxiv’s detection process, though bioRxiv states that preprints published with new titles or authors can go undetected (“About bioRxiv” n.d.), and preliminary data suggests this may affect thousands of preprints (Abdill and Blekhman 2019b). How these effects differ by country of origin remains unclear—perhaps authors from some countries are more likely to have their titles changed by journal editors, for example—but bias at the country level may also be more pronounced for other reasons.…”

“…Since 2013, more than 73,000 preprints have been posted to bioRxiv.org, the largest preprint server in the life sciences, including 29,178 in 2019 alone (Abdill and Blekhman 2019a). In addition to their rising popularity among researchers seeking to share their work outside the traditional pipelines of peer-reviewed journals, preprints provide authors with numerous potential benefits: Preprints may receive more citations after publication (Fu and Hughey 2019; Fraser et al 2020), and journals proactively search preprint servers to solicit submissions (Barsh et al 2016; Vence 2017). Programs such as In Review (https://researchsquare.com) and Review Commons (https://www.reviewcommons.org) coordinate with journals for peer review of preprints, and in late 2019 the journal eLife announced a “Preprint Review” program in which bioRxiv preprints submitted to eLife would be guaranteed to be sent out for peer review (Eisen 2019).…”

“…Preprints have been praised as a democratizing influence on scientific communication (Berg et al 2016), and the unlinking of research dissemination from peer review may dramatically alter the publishing landscape. Research suggests U.S. authors are overrepresented on bioRxiv compared to published literature (Fraser et al 2020), but the scientific community lacks a more specific understanding of who is availing themselves of preprint-based research dissemination opportunities. Here, we aim to answer these questions by analyzing a dataset of all preprints posted to bioRxiv through 2019.…”