11 May 2019

A pre-print experiment, part 3: Someone did notice

In 2016, I wrote a grumpy blog post about my worries that posting preprints is probably strongly subject to the Matthew effect. It was a reaction to Twitter anecdotes about researchers (usually famous) posting preprints and immediately getting lots of attention and feedback on their work. I wanted to see if someone less famous (i.e., me) could get attention for a preprint without personally spruiking it extensively on social media.

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
My little sand crab natural history paper is in the top half of papers in bioRxiv?

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 (BioOne site is paywalled; open access at https://www.jcronline.org/doi/full/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-16-00125.1)

Related posts

A pre-print experiment: will anyone notice?
A pre-print experiment, continued

Fiddly bits and increments

External links

Sand crab paper on Rxivist

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