Biology subjects

Mayr, P.

Publications and source records attributed to Mayr, P..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2021

Motivations, concerns and selection biases when posting preprints: a survey of bioRxiv authors

Since 2013, the usage of preprints as a means of sharing research in biology has rapidly grown, in particular via the preprint server bioRxiv. Recent studies have found that journal articles that were previously posted to bioRxiv received a higher number of citations or mentions/shares on other online platforms compared to articles in the same journals that were not posted. However, the exact causal mechanism for this effect has not been established, and may in part be related to authors biases in the selection of articles that are chosen to be posted as preprints. We aimed to investigate this mechanism by conducting a mixed-methods survey of 1,444 authors of bioRxiv preprints, to investigate the reasons that they post or do not post certain articles as preprints, and to make comparisons between articles they choose to post and not post as preprints. We find that authors are most strongly motivated to post preprints to increase awareness of their work and increase the speed of its dissemination; conversely, the strongest reasons for not posting preprints centre around a lack of awareness of preprints and reluctance to publicly post work that has not undergone a peer review process. We additionally find weak evidence that authors preferentially select their highest quality, most novel or most significant research to post as preprints, however, authors retain an expectation that articles they post as preprints will receive more citations or be shared more widely online than articles not posted.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2019

Tracking self-citations in academic publishing

Citation metrics have value because they aim to make scientific assessment a level playing field, but urgent transparency-based adjustments are necessary to ensure that measurements yield the most accurate picture of impact and excellence. One problematic area is the handling of self-citations, which are either excluded or inappropriately accounted for when using bibliometric indicators for research evaluation. Here, in favor of openly tracking self-citations we report on self-referencing behavior among various academic disciplines as captured by the curated Clarivate Analytics Web of Science database. Specifically, we examined the behavior of 385,616 authors grouped into 15 subject areas like Biology, Chemistry, Science & Technology, Engineering, and Physics. These authors have published 3,240,973 papers that have accumulated 90,806,462 citations, roughly five percent of which are self-citations. Up until now, very little is known about the buildup of self-citations at the author-level and in field-specific contexts. Our view is that hiding self-citation data is indefensible and needlessly confuses any attempts to understand the bibliometric impact of ones work. Instead we urge academics to embrace visibility of citation data in a community of peers, which relies on nuance and openness rather than curated scorekeeping.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2019

The effect of bioRxiv preprints on citations and altmetrics

1.A potential motivation for scientists to deposit their scientific work as preprints is to enhance its citation or social impact, an effect which has been empirically observed for preprints in physics, astronomy and mathematics deposited to arXiv. In this study we assessed the citation and altmetric advantage of bioRxiv, a preprint server for the biological sciences. We retrieved metadata of all bioRxiv preprints deposited between November 2013 and December 2017, and matched them to articles that were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. Citation data from Scopus and altmetric data from Altmetric.com were used to compare citation and online sharing behaviour of bioRxiv preprints, their related journal articles, and non-deposited articles published in the same journals. We found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles received a sizeable citation and altmetric advantage over non-deposited articles. Regression analysis reveals that this advantage is not explained by multiple explanatory variables related to the article and its authorship. bioRxiv preprints themselves are being directly cited in journal articles, regardless of whether the preprint has been subsequently published in a journal. bioRxiv preprints are also shared widely on Twitter and in blogs, but remain relatively scarce in mainstream media and Wikipedia articles, in comparison to peer-reviewed journal articles.

scientific communication and education↗