Abstract
We study whether novel ideas in biomedical literature appear first in preprints or traditional journals. We develop a Bayesian method to estimate the time of appearance for a phrase in the literature, and apply it to a number of phrases, both automatically extracted and suggested by experts. We see that presently most phrases appear first in the traditional journals, but there is a number of phrases with the first appearance on preprint servers. A comparison of the general composition of texts from bioRxiv and traditional journals shows a growing trend of bioRxiv being predictive of traditional journals. We discuss the application of the method for related problems.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
ssatish{at}cs.umass.edu, adrozdov{at}cs.umass.edu, zonghaiyao{at}cs.umass.edu
