Science Communication & Media
Preprinting of clinical studies subsequently published in high-impact journals and associations with Altmetric score and citation Seth Zissette* Seth Zissette Anant Gautam Joseph S. Ross Joshua D. Wallach
The use of preprints – preliminary research reports that have not yet undergone peer review – in clinical and health science research has increased in recent years. Although high-impact factor journals have largely adopted policies that are supportive of preprints, concerns remain that preprinting a manuscript prior to submission to a peer-reviewed journal may jeopardize consideration or preclude publication. Currently, little is known about how frequently research articles published in the highest-impact factor clinical journals are preprinted and associations between preprinting and the attention and citations that published articles receive. We identified all original research articles published in the 25 highest-impact factor clinical journals (7 general medicine and 18 internal medicine subspeciality journals) in 2022 (after the COVID pandemic had largely subsided). We used the bioRxiv/medRxiv API to identify any preprints with linked peer-reviewed publications in our sample. We then conducted Google searches to identify preprints for all remaining articles on other preprint servers (e.g., The Social Science Research Network). We identified the Altmetric Attention Score and number of citations for each article and used Wilcoxon tests to compare the distributions of these metrics among articles with and without a corresponding preprint. Among the 5,739 research articles published in 25 journals in 2022, 317 (5.5%) had a corresponding preprint. The median Altmetric Attention Score among articles with and without a corresponding preprint was 88.7 (IQR: 23.5-465.9) and 38.3 (IQR: 11.1-183.5), respectively (p<0.001). The median citation count among articles with and without a corresponding preprint was 24 (IQR: 11-60) and 11 (IQR: 5-25), respectively (p<0.001). We found that although relatively few research articles published in the highest-impact factor clinical journals in 2022 had a corresponding preprint, those that did received greater attention and citations.