I felt my preprint was ignored (until I wrote aforementioned grumpy blog post). But here we are a few years later, and I’m re-evaluating that conclusion.
A new article about bioRxiv is out (Abdill and Blekman 2019), and it includes Rxivist, a website that tracks data about manuscripts in bioRvix. Having posted a paper in BioRvix, that means that my paper is tracked in Rxivist.
It’s always interesting to be a data point in someone else’s paper.
The search function is a little wonky,but I did find my paper, and was surprised (click to enlarge).
Rxivist showed that there has been a small but consistent number of downloads (Downloaded 421 times). Not only that, but the paper is faring pretty well compared to others on the site.
- Download rankings, all-time:
- Site-wide: 17,413 out of 49,290
- In ecology: 542 out of 2,046
- Since beginning of last month:
- Site-wide: 19,899 out of 49,290
I did not expect that. Not at all.
I know there is an initial spike because I wrote my grumpy blog post and did an interview about preprints that got some attention, but even so. I know there aren’t hundreds of people doing research on sand crabs around the word, so hundreds of downloads is a much wider reach than I expected.
And some of the biggest months (October 2018) are after the final, official paper was published in Journal of Coastal Research. The final paper is open access on the journal website, too, so it’s not as though people are downloading the preprint because they are circimventing paywalls. (Though in researching this blog post, I learned a secondary site, BioOne, is not treating the paper as open access. Sigh.) (Update, 14 May 2019: BioOne fixed the open access problem!)
I am feeling much better about those numbers now than in the first few months after I posted the paper. I never would have anticipated that long tail of downloads years after the final paper is out.
And Rxivist certainly does a better job of providing metrics than the journal article does:
There’s an Altmetric score but nothing else. It’s nice that the Altmetric score for the preprint and published paper are directly comparable (and I’m happy to see the score of 24 for the paper is a little higher than the preprint at 13!), but I miss the data that Rxivist provides.
Other journals provide top 10 lists (and I’ve been happy to be on those a couple of times), but they tend to be very minimal. You often don’t know the underlying formula for how they generate those lists. The Journal of Coastal Research has a top 50 articles page that shows raw download numbers for those articles, and if you are not in that list, you have no idea how your article is doing.
While I still never got any feedback on my article before publication, I don’t feel like posting that preprint was a waste of time like I once did.
References
Abdill RJ, Blekhman R. 2019. Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprints. eLife 8: e45133. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.45133
Faulkes Z. 2016. The long-term sand crab study: phenology, geographic size variation, and a rare new colour morph in Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae). BioRXiv https://doi.org/10.1101/041376
Faulkes Z. 2017. The phenology of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae). Journal of Coastal Research 33(5): 1095-1101. https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-16-00125.1 (
Related posts
External links
Sand crab paper on Rxivist
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. Real names and pseudonyms are welcome. Anonymous comments are not and will be removed.