Department of Health Data Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
The Alan Turing Institute, London, United Kingdom.
PLoS Biol. 2022 Feb 1;20(2):e3001285. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001285. eCollection 2022 Feb.
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.
在 2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行期间，生物医学科学领域的预印本以空前的速度发布和获取，首次引起了公众、媒体和政策制定者的广泛关注。这一现象凸显了长期以来人们对期刊同行评审前分享信息可靠性的质疑。预印本中分享的信息通常能否经受住同行评审的严格审查，或者结论在记录版本中是否可能发生变化？我们评估了 bioRxiv 和 medRxiv 上的预印本，这些预印本于 2020 年 4 月 30 日之前发布并随后在期刊上发表，代表了大流行应对的初始阶段。我们结合使用自动和手动注释来量化文章在预印本和已发表版本之间的变化。我们发现，预印本和已发表文章之间的图面板和表格总数变化不大。此外，7.2%的非 COVID-19 相关摘要和 17.2%的 COVID-19 相关摘要的结论在发表时会发生离散变化，但这些变化中的大多数并没有从质上改变论文的结论。
