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Preprint citation practice in PLOS

Author

Listed:
  • Marc Bertin

    (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1)

  • Iana Atanassova

    (Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté
    Institut Universitaire de France (IUF))

Abstract

The role of preprints in the scientific production and their part in citations have been growing over the past 10 years. In this paper we study preprint citations in several different aspects: the progression of preprint citations over time, their relative frequencies in relation to the IMRaD structure of articles, their distributions over time, per preprint database and per PLOS journal. We have processed the PLOS corpus that covers 7 journals and a total of about 240,000 articles up to January 2021, and produced a dataset of 8460 preprint citation contexts that cite 12 different preprint databases. Our results show that preprint citations are found with the highest frequency in the Method section of articles, though small variations exist with respect to journals. The PLOS Computational Biology journal stands out as it contains more than three times more preprint citations than any other PLOS journal. The relative parts of the different preprint databases are also examined. While ArXiv and bioRxiv are the most frequent citation sources, bioRxiv’s disciplinary nature can be observed as it is the source of more than 70% of preprint citations in PLOS Biology, PLOS Genetics and PLOS Pathogens. We have also compared the lexical content of preprint citation contexts to the citation content to peer-reviewed publications. Finally, by performing a lexicometric analysis, we have shown that preprint citation contexts differ significantly from citation contexts of peer-reviewed publications. This confirms that authors make use of different lexical content when citing preprints compared to the rest of citations.

Suggested Citation

  • Marc Bertin & Iana Atanassova, 2022. "Preprint citation practice in PLOS," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(12), pages 6895-6912, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:127:y:2022:i:12:d:10.1007_s11192-022-04388-5
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04388-5
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Philippe Desjardins-Proulx & Ethan P White & Joel J Adamson & Karthik Ram & Timothée Poisot & Dominique Gravel, 2013. "The Case for Open Preprints in Biology," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(5), pages 1-5, May.
    2. Lê, Sébastien & Josse, Julie & Husson, François, 2008. "FactoMineR: An R Package for Multivariate Analysis," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 25(i01).
    3. 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.
    4. Jim Giles, 2003. "Preprint server seeks way to halt plagiarists," Nature, Nature, vol. 426(6962), pages 7-7, November.
    5. Vincent Larivière & Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Benoit Macaluso & Staša Milojević & Blaise Cronin & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "arXiv E-prints and the journal of record: An analysis of roles and relationships," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65(6), pages 1157-1169, June.
    6. Small, Henry, 2018. "Characterizing highly cited method and non-method papers using citation contexts: The role of uncertainty," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(2), pages 461-480.
    7. Guillaume Cabanac & Theodora Oikonomidi & Isabelle Boutron, 2021. "Day-to-day discovery of preprint–publication links," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 5285-5304, June.
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