ArticleBMC research notes2022
COVID-19-Related manuscripts: lag from preprint to publication.
Article in BMC research notes, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 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
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond correlation and causation: epistemic caution, anomalous findings, and COVID-19 vaccine safety.Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM · 2026Review
- Comparison of preprints and their corresponding peer-reviewed publications in the health field: a scoping review.Research integrity and peer review · 2026Review
- The Perspective on Secondary Research Practices: A Cross-Sectional Analysis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Public understanding of preprints: How audiences make sense of unreviewed research in the news.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2025Article
- Preprint pointers from a long COVID scoping review: considerations for source selection and searching.The journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivePreprints have had a prominent role in the swift scientific response to COVID-19. Two years into the pandemic, we investigated how much preprints had contributed to timely data sharing by analyzing the lag time from preprint posting to journal publication.
resultsTo estimate the median number of days between the date a manuscript was posted as a preprint and the date of its publication in a scientific journal, we analyzed preprints posted from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2021 in the NIH iSearch COVID-19 Portfolio database and performed a Kaplan-Meier (KM) survival analysis using a non-mixture parametric cure model. Of the 39,243 preprints in our analysis, 7712 (20%) were published in a journal, after a median lag of 178 days (95% CI: 175-181). Most of the published preprints were posted on the bioRxiv (29%) or medRxiv (65%) servers, which allow authors to choose a subject category when posting. Of the 20,698 preprints posted on these two servers, 7358 (36%) were published, including approximately half of those categorized as biochemistry, biophysics, and genomics, which became published articles within the study interval, compared with 29% categorized as epidemiology and 26% as bioinformatics.
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.