Meta-Research: Releasing a preprint is associated with more attention and citations for the peer-reviewed article
- Vanderbilt University Medical Center, United States
Abstract
Preprints in biology are becoming more popular, but only a small fraction of the articles published in peer-reviewed journals have previously been released as preprints. To examine whether releasing a preprint on bioRxiv was associated with the attention and citations received by the corresponding peer-reviewed article, we assembled a dataset of 74,239 articles, 5,405 of which had a preprint, published in 39 journals. Using log-linear regression and random-effects meta-analysis, we found that articles with a preprint had, on average, a 49% higher Altmetric Attention Score and 36% more citations than articles without a preprint. These associations were independent of several other article- and author-level variables (such as scientific subfield and number of authors), and were unrelated to journal-level variables such as access model and Impact Factor. This observational study can help researchers and publishers make informed decisions about how to incorporate preprints into their work.
Data availability
Code and data to reproduce this study are available on Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8855795). In accordance with Altmetric's data use agreement, the Figshare repository does not include each article's Altmetric data, which are available from Altmetric after obtaining an API key.
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RxivistDocker Hub, blekhmanlab/rxivist_data:2019-08-30.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R35GM124685)
- Jacob J Hughey
U.S. National Library of Medicine (T15LM007450)
- Darwin Y Fu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2019, Fu & Hughey
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Meta-Research: Releasing a preprint is associated with more attention and citations for the peer-reviewed article
eLife 8:e52646.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52646
