Meta-Research: Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprints
- University of Minnesota, United States
Abstract
The growth of preprints in the life sciences has been reported widely and is driving policy changes for journals and funders, but little quantitative information has been published about preprint usage. Here, we report how we collected and analyzed data on all 37,648 preprints uploaded to bioRxiv.org, the largest biology-focused preprint server, in its first five years. The rate of preprint uploads to bioRxiv continues to grow (exceeding 2,100 in October 2018), as does the number of downloads (1.1 million in October 2018). We also find that two-thirds of preprints posted before 2017 were later published in peer-reviewed journals, and find a relationship between the number of downloads a preprint has received and the impact factor of the journal in which it is published. We also describe Rxivist.org, a web application that provides multiple ways to interact with preprint metadata.
Data availability
Source data for all figures have been provided in supporting files. A database snapshot containing all data collected for this study has been deposited in a Zenodo repository with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.2465688.
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Data from: Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprintsZenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.2465688.
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Complete Rxivist dataset of scraped bioRxiv dataZenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.2529922.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
College of Biological Sciences, University of Minnesota
- Ran Blekhman
National Institutes of Health (R35-GM128716)
- Ran Blekhman
University of Minnesota (McKnight Land-Grant Professorship)
- Ran Blekhman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2019, Abdill & Blekhman
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.
Metrics
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- 15,665
- views
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- 1,081
- downloads
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- 143
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
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Meta-Research: Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprints
eLife 8:e45133.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.45133
