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Preprints in motion: tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic

View ORCID ProfileLiam Brierley, View ORCID ProfileFederico Nanni, View ORCID ProfileJessica K Polka, View ORCID ProfileGautam Dey, View ORCID ProfileMáté Pálfy, View ORCID ProfileNicholas Fraser, View ORCID ProfileJonathon Alexis Coates
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.20.432090
Liam Brierley
1Department of Health Data Science, University of Liverpool, Brownlow Street, Liverpool, L69 3GL, UK
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Federico Nanni
2The Alan Turing Institute, 96 Euston Rd, London NW1 2DB, UK
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Jessica K Polka
3ASAPbio, 3739 Balboa St # 1038, San Francisco, CA 94121, USA
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Gautam Dey
4Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstr. 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
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Máté Pálfy
5The Company of Biologists, Bidder Building, Station Road, Histon, Cambridge CB24 9LF, 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 from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through 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 7.2% of non-COVID-19-related and 17.2% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not qualitatively change the conclusions 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. GD and JAC are contributors to preLights and ASAPbio Fellows. The authors declare no other competing interests.

Footnotes

  • Included additional analysis to investigate altmetric data and also the impact of time taken to publish on degree of change. Major additions are improved statistics throughout the manuscript.

  • 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 October 14, 2021.
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Preprints in motion: tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic
Liam Brierley, Federico Nanni, Jessica K Polka, Gautam Dey, Máté Pálfy, 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 preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic
Liam Brierley, Federico Nanni, Jessica K Polka, Gautam Dey, Máté Pálfy, Nicholas Fraser, Jonathon Alexis Coates
bioRxiv 2021.02.20.432090; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.20.432090

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