Abstract
Preprints allow researchers to make their findings available to the scientific community before they have undergone peer review. Studies on preprints within bioRxiv have been largely focused on article metadata and how often these preprints are downloaded, cited, published, and discussed online. A missing element that has yet to be examined is the language contained within the bioRxiv preprint repository. We sought to compare and contrast linguistic features within bioRxiv preprints to published biomedical text as a whole as this is an excellent opportunity to examine how peer review changes these documents. The most prevalent features that changed appear to be associated with typesetting and mentions of supplementary sections or additional files. In addition to text comparison, we created document embeddings derived from a preprint-trained word2vec model. We found that these embeddings are able to parse out different scientific approaches and concepts, link unannotated preprint-peer reviewed article pairs, and identify journals that publish linguistically similar papers to a given preprint. We also used these embeddings to examine factors associated with the time elapsed between the posting of a first preprint and the appearance of a peer reviewed publication. We found that preprints with more versions posted and more textual changes took longer to publish. Lastly, we constructed a web application (https://greenelab.github.io/preprint-similarity-search/) that allows users to identify which journals and articles that are most linguistically similar to a bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint as well as observe where the preprint would be positioned within a published article landscape.
Competing Interest Statement
Marvin Thielk receives a salary from Elsevier Inc. where he contributes NLP expertise to health content operations. Elsevier did not restrict the results or interpretations that could be published in this manuscript. The opinions expressed here do not reflect the official policy or positions of Elsevier Inc.
Footnotes
↵a Funded by The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF4552); The National Institutes of Health (T32 HG000046)
↵b Funded by The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF4552); The National Institutes of Health (R01 HG010067)
↵c Funded by The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF4552)
This manuscript (permalink) was automatically generated from greenelab/annorxiver_manuscript@2034e45 on May 12, 2021.
Add comparison to preprints in motion set described in Polka et al. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.20.432090v1