ArticlePLoS biology2022
Tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic.
Article in PLoS biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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
34 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Comparison of Preprint Postings of Randomized Clinical Trials on COVID-19 and Corresponding Published Journal Articles: A Systematic Review.JAMA network open · 2023Pooled it
- Three out of four published systematic reviews on COVID-19 treatments were not registered and one-third of those registered were published: a meta-research study.Journal of clinical epidemiology · 2022Pooled it
- Open Science Practices in Systematic Reviews From 2014 to 2024: A Cohort Study of 300 Systematic Reviews.Cochrane evidence synthesis and methods · 2026Article
- Prediction of transformative breakthroughs in biomedical research.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Preprint policies across journals and publishers in ecology and evolutionary biology.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Staying ahead of the curve: a decade of preprints in biology.Biology open · 2025Article
- The academic impact of Open Science: a scoping review.Royal Society open science · 2025Review
- Predicting the replicability of social and behavioural science claims in COVID-19 preprints.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Public understanding of preprints: How audiences make sense of unreviewed research in the news.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2025Article
- An evaluation of the preprints produced at the beginning of the 2022 mpox public health emergency.Research integrity and peer review · 2024Article
- Preprint pointers from a long COVID scoping review: considerations for source selection and searching.The journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association · 2024Article
- Methods for conducting a living evidence profile on mpox: An evidence map of the literature.Cochrane evidence synthesis and methods · 2024Article
- Phase 1 of the National Institutes of Health Preprint Pilot: Testing the viability of making preprints discoverable in PubMed Central and PubMed.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Comparison of effect estimates between preprints and peer-reviewed journal articles of COVID-19 trials.BMC medical research methodology · 2024Article
- Article
- Dissemination of Registered COVID-19 Clinical Trials (DIRECCT): a cross-sectional study.BMC medicine · 2023Article
- Comparison of COVID-19 Preprint and Peer-Reviewed Versions of Studies on Therapies for Critically Ill Patients.Journal of intensive care medicine · 2023Article
- Full publication of preprint articles in prevention research: an analysis of publication proportions and results consistency.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Predicting substantive biomedical citations without full text.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Amid the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, preprints in the biomedical sciences are being posted and accessed at unprecedented rates, drawing widespread attention from the general public, press, and policymakers for the first time. This phenomenon has sharpened long-standing questions about the reliability of information shared prior to journal peer review. Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through April 30, 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response. We utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article changed between the preprinted and published version. We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 7.2% of non-COVID-19-related and 17.2% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not qualitatively change the conclusions of the paper.
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.