Abstract
IntroductionWhile early commenting on studies is seen as one of the advantages of preprints, the type of such comments, and the people who post them, have not been systematically explored.Materials and methodsWe analysed comments posted between 21 May 2015 and 9 September 2019 for 1983 bioRxiv preprints that received only one comment on the bioRxiv website. The comment types were classified by three coders independently, with all differences resolved by consensus.ResultsOur analysis showed that 69% of comments were posted by non-authors (N = 1366), and 31% by the preprints’ authors themselves (N = 617). Twelve percent of non-author comments (N = 168) were full review reports traditionally found during journal review, while the rest most commonly contained praises (N = 577, 42%), suggestions (N = 399, 29%), or criticisms (N = 226, 17%). Authors’ comments most commonly contained publication status updates (N = 354, 57%), additional study information (N = 158, 26%), or solicited feedback for the preprints (N = 65, 11%).ConclusionsOur results indicate that comments posted for bioRxiv preprints may have potential benefits for both the public and the scholarly community. Further research is needed to measure the direct impact of these comments on comments made by journal peer reviewers, subsequent preprint versions or journal publications.
Highlights
While early commenting on studies is seen as one of the advantages of preprints, the type of such comments, and the people who post them, have not been systematically explored
More than two thirds of those comments were posted by non-authors (N = 1366, 69%), while the remainder were posted by the preprint’s authors themselves (N = 617, 31%, Table 1)
The non-author comments were longer than comments posted by the authors (Mann-Whitney test, P < 0.001), and they were posted a median of 23 days after the preprints
Summary
While early commenting on studies is seen as one of the advantages of preprints, the type of such comments, and the people who post them, have not been systematically explored. Once almost exclusively limited to the fields of high energy physics and economics on arXiv, RePec and SSRN preprint servers, preprints have gained much ground across a wide range of disciplines, including medical biochemistry and laboratory medicine [1]. Meta-research on preprints, remains scarce and is mostly limited to the explorations of two servers: arXiv (which includes sections on biomolecules and genomics) and bioRxiv (which includes sections on biochemistry and genomics). This limi ted research has shown that citation of preprints in scholarly literature had increased, and that articles first posted as preprints had higher citations rates and Altmetric scores than those not posted as preprints [2]. Only minimal changes were found between preprints and the versions (of record) published in journals [4]
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