Post Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:27 pm

Peer-reviewed papers not linked back to preprints

Hi all,

A couple weeks ago, I was updating the CyTOF literature links on which preprints were now published (that's why there were so many announcements in a couple days). In the process, I was finding that there were a lot of papers where the preprint (bioRxiv, etc) did not have a link to the peer-reviewed article. In fact, in the case of bioRxiv, there was only a 50% linkage rate.


I reached out to bioRxiv (at CSHL) and also to some people at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (since they help fund bioRxiv). The exact reason(s) for the low linkage rate are still unclear:

Are authors not linking to the preprint when they submit to a journal?

Are the journals not notifying the preprint server when a paper is accepted?

Are the preprint server search algorithms not doing a good job matching to the peer-reviewed article?

Are authors not responding to queries from the preprint servers about possible matches?


Regardless, at the present time, you should *NOT* assume that a preprint and peer-reviewed article are linked automatically.


I have attached an Excel (as of 120622) of the 205 CyTOF papers I found that were preprints and which were never linked to the peer-reviewed article.
So, if you're an author and want them linked, you should take the initiative and check the preprint yourself (maybe there's a way to do it directly yourself?). And if you're doing a literature survey, assume that you'll need to hunt for them yourself....the current 50% success rate is just good enough to be misleading.


Mike