ArticleRoyal Society open science2020
Credibility of preprints: an interdisciplinary survey of researchers.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Open Science Practices in Systematic Reviews From 2014 to 2024: A Cohort Study of 300 Systematic Reviews.Cochrane evidence synthesis and methods · 2026Article
- Awareness, Experiences, and Attitudes Toward Preprints Among Medical Academics: Convergent Mixed Methods Study.JMIRx med · 2026Article
- Comparison of preprints and their corresponding peer-reviewed publications in the health field: a scoping review.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Review
- A survey of how biology researchers assess credibility when serving on grant and hiring committees.PeerJ · 2026Article
- From policy to practice: progress towards data- and code-sharing in ecology and evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- An international, cross-sectional survey of preprint attitudes among biomedical researchers.F1000Research · 2024Article
- Scope and financial impact of unpublished data and unused samples among U.S. academic and government researchers.iScience · 2023Article
- The use and acceptability of preprints in health and social care settings: A scoping review.PloS one · 2023Article
- Article
- Ensuring an Accurate Scientific Record in an Era of Pre-print Servers.Deutsches Arzteblatt international · 2022Review
- Forecasting the publication and citation outcomes of COVID-19 preprints.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The ESCMID ethics advisory committee (EEAC): purpose and challenges.Clinical microbiology and infection : the official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases · 2022Article
- Impact of computational approaches in the fight against COVID-19: an AI guided review of 17 000 studies.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2022Review
- Science in motion: A qualitative analysis of journalists' use and perception of preprints.PloS one · 2022Article
- Reporting all results efficiently: A RARE proposal to open up the file drawer.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Article
- Adjusting the use of preprints to accommodate the 'quality' factor in response to COVID-19.Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences · 2021Article
- Open Accessibility in Education Research: Enhancing the Credibility, Equity, Impact, and Efficiency of Research.Educational psychologist · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Preprints increase accessibility and can speed scholarly communication if researchers view them as credible enough to read and use. Preprint services do not provide the heuristic cues of a journal's reputation, selection, and peer-review processes that, regardless of their flaws, are often used as a guide for deciding what to read. We conducted a survey of 3759 researchers across a wide range of disciplines to determine the importance of different cues for assessing the credibility of individual preprints and preprint services. We found that cues related to information about open science content and independent verification of author claims were rated as highly important for judging preprint credibility, and peer views and author information were rated as less important. As of early 2020, very few preprint services display any of the most important cues. By adding such cues, services may be able to help researchers better assess the credibility of preprints, enabling scholars to more confidently use preprints, thereby accelerating scientific communication and discovery.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.