Preprint servers: a ‘rush to publish’ or ‘just in time delivery’ for science?

Abstract

At the time of writing, the WHO has declared COVID-19 a pandemic and healthcare systems around the world face the biggest public health challenge for a generation. As never before, the clinical and scientific communities, governments and the public need access to robust data to facilitate evidence-based decision-making. The foundation of a reliable research literature is effective peer review. However, in the last decade, there has been debate over the effectiveness of peer review. Research in the field has shown that prestigious journals reject manuscripts which go on to be highly cited elsewhere.1 The peer review process introduces considerable delay in making research findings publicly available2 and yet there is no correlation between the number of rounds of manuscript review and revision and the subsequent citation count for the paper.1 The stage is therefore set for the entrance of a new actor—the preprint server. A recent article (posted as a preprint) identified almost 50 preprint servers, open research bundles or other disruptive technologies which have entered the field in recent years.3 The distinctive feature of preprint servers is that they do not undertake peer review but restrict scrutiny to basic screening and legal checks, such as for plagiarism. However, preprint servers do allow online comments from the scientific community—a form …

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No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.