Abstract
Preprints are assuming an increasingly pivotal role in the realm of scientific communication. Capitalizing on their early accessibility, open access, and expeditious peer feedback, it is anticipated that submissions accompanied by preprints would enjoy advantages in terms of acceptance time. This study compared the differences in acceptance time between 100,077 preprint papers from the platforms arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, and 1,314,973 non-preprint papers submitted to the same journal within the same year and month. All these papers are indexed in PubMed, indicating that the majority originate from the life sciences and biomedical fields. The findings demonstrate that manuscripts released as preprints before journal submission experience significantly shorter acceptance time compared to those without preprints. However, if preprints are posted after submitting to a journal, they do not confer an advantage in terms of acceptance time. Furthermore, regression results grouped by Journal Impact Factor quartiles, Preprint-submission duration, preprint platform, pre- and post-COVID-19 outbreak, as well as by discipline, consistently demonstrate that preprint papers released as preprints before journal submission have an advantage in acceptance time.
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Acknowledgements
The manuscript is a new and extended version of our previous work which was accepted by the 27th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2023) (Tian et al., 2023). The manuscript has been released on the preprint platform Orvium by the conference organizers. This work was supported by the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (KYCX23_0083).
Funding
This work was funded by Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province, KYCX23_0083, Dan Tian.
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Tian, D., Liu, X. & Li, J. Accelerated acceptance time for preprint submissions: a comparative analysis based on PubMed. Scientometrics 129, 3787–3807 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05056-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05056-6