Preprint publishing challenges the status quo in medicine
Who’s reading?
Regardless of whether peer-review journals grant them legitimacy, preprints are getting a lot of views. A recent research letter, published in JAMA, looked at readership and online attention in 7,750 preprints posted from November 2013 to January 2017.
Primary author Stylianos Serghiou then selected 776 papers that had first appeared in bioRxiv, and matched them with 3,647 peer-reviewed articles lacking preprint exposure. He examined several publishing metrics for the papers, including views and downloads, citations in other sources, and Altmetric scores.
Altmetric tracks digital attention to scientific papers: Wikipedia citations, mentions in policy documents, blog discussions, and social media mentions including Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. An Altmetric “attention score” of more than 20 corresponds to articles in the top 5% of readership, he said in an interview.
“Almost one in five of the bioRxiv preprints were getting these very high Almetric scores – much higher scores than articles that had no preprint posting,” Mr. Serghiou said in an interview.
Other findings include:
