Tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic

• Published in: PLoS biology 2022-02, Vol.20 (2), p.e3001285-e3001285
• Main Authors: Brierley, Liam, Nanni, Federico, Polka, Jessica K, Dey, Gautam, Pálfy, Máté, Fraser, Nicholas, Coates, Jonathon Alexis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Annotations; Authorship; Computer and Information Sciences; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; COVID-19 - epidemiology; COVID-19 - prevention & control; COVID-19 - virology; Epidemics; Forecasts and trends; Humans; Information Dissemination - methods; Medical journals; Medical research; Medicine and Health Sciences; Meta; Pandemics; Pandemics - prevention & control; Peer review; Peer Review, Research - methods; Peer Review, Research - standards; Peer Review, Research - trends; Periodicals as Topic - standards; Periodicals as Topic - statistics & numerical data; Periodicals as Topic - trends; Publications - standards; Publications - statistics & numerical data; Publications - trends; Publishing; Publishing - standards; Publishing - statistics & numerical data; Publishing - trends; Research and Analysis Methods; SARS-CoV-2 - isolation & purification; SARS-CoV-2 - physiology; Servers; Social aspects; Social Sciences; United Kingdom; Viral diseases
• ISSN: 1545-7885; 1544-9173; 1545-7885
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001285

Amid the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, preprints in the biomedical sciences are being posted and accessed at unprecedented rates, drawing widespread attention from the general public, press, and policymakers for the first time. This phenomenon has sharpened long-standing questions about the reliability of information shared prior to journal peer review. Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through April 30, 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response. We utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article changed between the preprinted and published version. We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 7.2% of non-COVID-19-related and 17.2% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not qualitatively change the conclusions of the paper.