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Preprints in motion: tracking changes between posting and journal publication

View ORCID ProfileJessica K Polka, View ORCID ProfileGautam Dey, View ORCID ProfileMáté Pálfy, View ORCID ProfileFederico Nanni, View ORCID ProfileLiam Brierley, View ORCID ProfileNicholas Fraser, View ORCID ProfileJonathon Alexis Coates
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.20.432090
Jessica K Polka
1ASAPbio, 3739 Balboa St # 1038, San Francisco, CA 94121, USA
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Gautam Dey
2Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstr. 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
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Máté Pálfy
3The Company of Biologists, Bidder Building, Station Road, Histon, Cambridge CB24 9LF, UK
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Federico Nanni
4The Alan Turing Institute, 96 Euston Rd, London NW1 2DB, UK
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Liam Brierley
5Department of Health Data Science, University of Liverpool, Brownlow Street, Liverpool, L69 3GL, UK
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Nicholas Fraser
6Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Düsternbrooker Weg 120, 24105 Kiel, Germany
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Jonathon Alexis Coates
7William Harvey Research Institute, Charterhouse Square, Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry Queen Mary University of London, London, EC1M 6BQ, UK
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  • For correspondence: jonathon.coates@qmul.ac.uk
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Abstract

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints in the biomedical sciences are being posted and accessed at unprecedented rates, drawing widespread attention from the general public, press and policymakers for the first time. This phenomenon has sharpened longstanding questions about the reliability of information shared prior to journal peer review. Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal between 1st January and 30th April 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response. We utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article changed between the preprinted and published version. We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 6% of non-COVID-19-related and 15% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not reverse the main message of the paper.

Competing Interest Statement

JP is the executive director of ASAPbio, a non-profit organization promoting the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. GD is a bioRxiv Affiliate, part of a volunteer group of scientists that screen preprints deposited on the bioRxiv server. MP is the community manager for preLights, a non-profit preprint highlighting service. GD and JAC are contributors to preLights and ASAPbio Fellows. The authors declare no other competing interests.

Footnotes

  • https://zenodo.org/record/4551541#.YDEvLXmnxPY

  • https://github.com/preprinting-a-pandemic/preprint_changes

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted February 20, 2021.
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Preprints in motion: tracking changes between posting and journal publication
Jessica K Polka, Gautam Dey, Máté Pálfy, Federico Nanni, Liam Brierley, Nicholas Fraser, Jonathon Alexis Coates
bioRxiv 2021.02.20.432090; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.20.432090
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Preprints in motion: tracking changes between posting and journal publication
Jessica K Polka, Gautam Dey, Máté Pálfy, Federico Nanni, Liam Brierley, Nicholas Fraser, Jonathon Alexis Coates
bioRxiv 2021.02.20.432090; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.20.432090

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