IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/infome/v16y2022i2s1751157722000104.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A study of referencing changes in preprint-publication pairs across multiple fields

Author

Listed:
  • Akbaritabar, Aliakbar
  • Stephen, Dimity
  • Squazzoni, Flaminio

Abstract

Manuscripts have a complex development process with multiple influencing factors. Reconstructing this process is difficult without large-scale, comparable data on different versions of manuscripts. Preprints are increasingly available and may provide access to the earliest manuscript versions. Here, we matched 6024 preprint-publication pairs across multiple fields and examined changes in their reference lists between the manuscript versions as one aspect of manuscripts’ development. We also qualitatively analysed the context of references to investigate the potential reasons for changes. We found that 90% of references were unchanged between versions and 8% were newly added. We found that manuscripts in the natural and medical sciences undergo more extensive reframing of the literature while changes in engineering mostly focused on methodological details. Our qualitative analysis suggests that peer review increases the methodological soundness of scientific claims, improves the communication of findings, and ensures appropriate credit for previous research.

Suggested Citation

  • Akbaritabar, Aliakbar & Stephen, Dimity & Squazzoni, Flaminio, 2022. "A study of referencing changes in preprint-publication pairs across multiple fields," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:16:y:2022:i:2:s1751157722000104
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2022.101258
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157722000104
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joi.2022.101258?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Sarvenaz Sarabipour & Humberto J Debat & Edward Emmott & Steven J Burgess & Benjamin Schwessinger & Zach Hensel, 2019. "On the value of preprints: An early career researcher perspective," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(2), pages 1-12, February.
    2. Niccolò Casnici & Francisco Grimaldo & Nigel Gilbert & Pierpaolo Dondio & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2017. "Assessing peer review by gauging the fate of rejected manuscripts: the case of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 533-546, October.
    3. Niccolò Casnici & Francisco Grimaldo & Nigel Gilbert & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2017. "Attitudes of referees in a multidisciplinary journal: An empirical analysis," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68(7), pages 1763-1771, July.
    4. Vladimir Batagelj & Anuška Ferligoj & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2017. "The emergence of a field: a network analysis of research on peer review," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 503-532, October.
    5. Marc Bertin & Iana Atanassova & Yves Gingras & Vincent Larivière, 2016. "The invariant distribution of references in scientific articles," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(1), pages 164-177, January.
    6. Hengel, E., 2017. "Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1753, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    7. Jialiang Lin & Yao Yu & Yu Zhou & Zhiyang Zhou & Xiaodong Shi, 2020. "How many preprints have actually been printed and why: a case study of computer science preprints on arXiv," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 555-574, July.
    8. Teplitskiy, Misha & Acuna, Daniel & Elamrani-Raoult, Aïda & Körding, Konrad & Evans, James, 2018. "The sociology of scientific validity: How professional networks shape judgement in peer review," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(9), pages 1825-1841.
    9. Flaminio Squazzoni & Petra Ahrweiler & Tiago Barros & Federico Bianchi & Aliaksandr Birukou & Harry J. J. Blom & Giangiacomo Bravo & Stephen Cowley & Virginia Dignum & Pierpaolo Dondio & Francisco Gri, 2020. "Unlock ways to share data on peer review," Nature, Nature, vol. 578(7796), pages 512-514, February.
    10. Duncan J. Watts, 2017. "Should social science be more solution-oriented?," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 1(1), pages 1-5, January.
    11. J. Rigby & D. Cox & K. Julian, 2018. "Journal peer review: a bar or bridge? An analysis of a paper’s revision history and turnaround time, and the effect on citation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(3), pages 1087-1105, March.
    12. Bas Hofstra & Vivek V. Kulkarni & Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez & Bryan He & Dan Jurafsky & Daniel A. McFarland, 2020. "The Diversity–Innovation Paradox in Science," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117(17), pages 9284-9291, April.
    13. Flaminio Squazzoni & Francisco Grimaldo & Ana Marušić, 2017. "Publishing: Journals could share peer-review data," Nature, Nature, vol. 546(7658), pages 352-352, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peng, Wen & Yue, Mingliang & Sun, Mingyue & Ma, Tingcan, 2024. "Revision and academic impact: A case study of bioRxiv preprint papers," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1).
    2. Dimity Stephen, 2022. "Peer reviewers equally critique theory, method, and writing, with limited effect on the final content of accepted manuscripts," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(6), pages 3413-3435, June.
    3. Andrijana Perković Paloš & Antonija Mijatović & Ivan Buljan & Daniel Garcia-Costa & Elena Álvarez-García & Francisco Grimaldo & Ana Marušić, 2023. "Linguistic and semantic characteristics of articles and peer review reports in Social Sciences and Medical and Health Sciences: analysis of articles published in Open Research Central," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(8), pages 4707-4729, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bianchi, Federico & García-Costa, Daniel & Grimaldo, Francisco & Squazzoni, Flaminio, 2022. "Measuring the effect of reviewers on manuscript change: A study on a sample of submissions to Royal Society journals (2006–2017)," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(3).
    2. Balázs Győrffy & Andrea Magda Nagy & Péter Herman & Ádám Török, 2018. "Factors influencing the scientific performance of Momentum grant holders: an evaluation of the first 117 research groups," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(1), pages 409-426, October.
    3. Bianchi, Federico & Grimaldo, Francisco & Squazzoni, Flaminio, 2019. "The F3-index. Valuing reviewers for scholarly journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 78-86.
    4. Bravo, Giangiacomo & Farjam, Mike & Grimaldo Moreno, Francisco & Birukou, Aliaksandr & Squazzoni, Flaminio, 2018. "Hidden connections: Network effects on editorial decisions in four computer science journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 101-112.
    5. Sun, Zhuanlan, 2024. "Textual features of peer review predict top-cited papers: An interpretable machine learning perspective," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    6. Zhang, Guangyao & Xu, Shenmeng & Sun, Yao & Jiang, Chunlin & Wang, Xianwen, 2022. "Understanding the peer review endeavor in scientific publishing," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    7. Vladimir Batagelj & Anuška Ferligoj & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2017. "The emergence of a field: a network analysis of research on peer review," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 503-532, October.
    8. Shan Jiang, 2021. "Understanding authors' psychological reactions to peer reviews: a text mining approach," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(7), pages 6085-6103, July.
    9. Petersen, Alexander M., 2019. "Megajournal mismanagement: Manuscript decision bias and anomalous editor activity at PLOS ONE," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(4).
    10. ederico Bianchi & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2022. "Can transparency undermine peer review? A simulation model of scientist behavior under open peer review [Reviewing Peer Review]," Science and Public Policy, Oxford University Press, vol. 49(5), pages 791-800.
    11. J. Rigby & D. Cox & K. Julian, 2018. "Journal peer review: a bar or bridge? An analysis of a paper’s revision history and turnaround time, and the effect on citation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(3), pages 1087-1105, March.
    12. Jonathan P. Tennant & Harry Crane & Tom Crick & Jacinto Davila & Asura Enkhbayar & Johanna Havemann & Bianca Kramer & Ryan Martin & Paola Masuzzo & Andy Nobes & Curt Rice & Bárbara Rivera-López & Tony, 2019. "Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing," Publications, MDPI, vol. 7(2), pages 1-24, May.
    13. Lorenzo Ductor & Sanjeev Goyal & Anja Prummer, 2018. "Gender & Collaboration," Working Papers 856, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    14. David Card & Stefano DellaVigna & Patricia Funk & Nagore Iriberri, 2020. "Are Referees and Editors in Economics Gender Neutral?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 135(1), pages 269-327.
    15. Ina Ganguli & Marieke Huysentruyt & Chloé Le Coq, 2021. "How Do Nascent Social Entrepreneurs Respond to Rewards? A Field Experiment on Motivations in a Grant Competition," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(10), pages 6294-6316, October.
    16. Julian Kolev & Yuly Fuentes-Medel & Fiona Murray, 2019. "Is Blinded Review Enough? How Gendered Outcomes Arise Even Under Anonymous Evaluation," NBER Working Papers 25759, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Barron, Kai & Ditlmann, Ruth & Gehrig, Stefan & Schweighofer-Kodritsch, Sebastian, 2020. "Explicit and implicit belief-based gender discrimination: A hiring experiment," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Economics of Change SP II 2020-306, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    18. Cloos, Janis & Greiff, Matthias & Rusch, Hannes, 2020. "Geographical Concentration and Editorial Favoritism within the Field of Laboratory Experimental Economics (RM/19/029-revised-)," Research Memorandum 014, Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE).
    19. Dangzhi Zhao & Andreas Strotmann, 2020. "Telescopic and panoramic views of library and information science research 2011–2018: a comparison of four weighting schemes for author co-citation analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 255-270, July.
    20. Shuo Xu & Liyuan Hao & Xin An & Hongshen Pang & Ting Li, 2020. "Review on emerging research topics with key-route main path analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(1), pages 607-624, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:16:y:2022:i:2:s1751157722000104. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/joi .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.