Global inequities and authorship discrepancies discovered in scientific publishing by PreprintMatch
A large study of matching preprints and their corresponding published papers shed light on known country-level inequities in scientific publishing.
SAN DIEGO, CA, USA, March 8, 2023 -- Preprints, versions of scientific manuscripts that precede peer review, are growing in popularity. They offer an opportunity to democratize and accelerate research, as they have no publication costs or a lengthy peer review process. Preprints are often later published in peer-reviewed venues, but these publications and the original preprints are frequently not linked in any way. To this end, we developed a tool,?PreprintMatch, to find matches between preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv and their corresponding published papers on PubMed.
We found that preprints from low-income countries were published quicker but also were published as peer-reviewed papers at a lower rate than high-income countries. In addition, less title, abstract, and author similarity to the published version compared to high-income countries. Low-income countries add more authors from the preprint to the published version than high-income countries.
"Authors from lower-income countries collaborating with high-income country authors have a higher chance of publication.”
— Anita Bandrowski, CEO of SciCrunch
“Our results suggest that the lack of papers coming from low/lower and middle-income countries is not entirely from a lack of research occurring,” says Anita Bandrowski, neuroscience researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and CEO of?SciCrunch. “Furthermore, authors from lower-income countries collaborating with high-income country authors have a higher chance of publication. ”
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Significantly, researchers in China add more authors to their papers than researchers in equivalently productive countries, which is potentially explainable by authorship having a strong financial incentive. This is a pattern highly resembling papermill papers, adding authors that pay for a publication.
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SciCrunch Inc. is home to platforms such as the Resource Identification Initiative, the Antibody Registry, and SciScore . We know the “ingredients” that go into your scientific paper and we work closely with the research community. We provide platforms, tools, and muscle to enable scientists, resource providers, and companies to track research reagents and to check rigor and transparency in methods. SciScore won the 2022 Vesalius Innovation Award runner-up prize and was a 2020 ALPSP Innovation Award finalist.
Contact Researchers - Anita Bandrowski
Contact Media/Publishers - Martijn Roelandse