Global inequities and authorship discrepancies discovered in scientific publishing by PreprintMatch
March 8, 2023
Map of the rate of preprint publication for the top 50 research-producing countries.
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 /EINPresswire.com/ -- 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.
“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. Furthermore, authors from lower-income countries collaborating with high-income country authors have a higher chance of publication. ”
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.
More information
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281659
The journal's name: PLOS ONE
