Search

There is increasing scrutiny around how science is communicated to the public. For instance, a Twitter account @justsaysinmice (with 70.4K followers in January 2021) was created to call attention to news headlines that omit that mice, not humans, are the ones for whom the study findings apply. This is the case of many headlines reporting on Alzheimer disease (AD) research. AD is characterized by a degeneration of the human brain, loss of cognition, and behavioral changes, for which no treatment is available. Around 200 rodent models have been developed to study AD, even though AD is an exclusively human condition that does not occur naturally in other species and appears impervious to reproduction in artificial animal models, an information not always disclosed. It is not known what prompts writers of news stories to either omit or acknowledge, in the story’s headlines, that the study was done in mice and not in humans. Here, we raised the hypothesis that how science is reported by scientists plays a role on the news reporting. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether an association exists between articles’ titles and news’ headlines regarding the omission, or not, of mice. To this end, we analyzed a sample of 623 open-access scientific papers indexed in PubMed in 2018 and 2019 that used mice either as models or as the biological source for experimental studies in AD research. We found a significant association (p < 0.01) between articles’ titles and news stories’ headlines, revealing that when authors omit the species in the paper’s title, writers of news stories tend to follow suit. We also found that papers not mentioning mice in their titles are more newsworthy and significantly more tweeted than papers that do. Our study shows that science reporting may affect media reporting and asks for changes in the way we report about findings obtained with animal models used to study human diseases., This study reveals that when scientists omit from the papers’ title that research findings were obtained using mice, as opposed to humans, the media tend to replicate the trend by omitting the use of mice from the news stories headlines that report on these papers, thereby perpetuating the misleading omission.

Citation metrics are widely used and misused. We have created a publicly available database of 100,000 top scientists that provides standardized information on citations, h-index, coauthorship-adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions, and a composite indicator. Separate data are shown for career-long and single-year impact. Metrics with and without self-citations and ratio of citations to citing papers are given. Scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields. Field- and subfield-specific percentiles are also provided for all scientists who have published at least five papers. Career-long data are updated to end of 2017 and to end of 2018 for comparison., Citation metrics are widely used and misused. This Community Page article presents a publicly available database that provides standardized information on multiple citation indicators and a composite thereof, annotating each author according to his/her main scientific field(s).

Preprints have arrived. In increasing numbers, researchers across the life sciences are embracing the once-niche practice, shaking off decades of reluctance and posting hundreds of papers per week to preprint servers, sharing their findings with the community before embarking on the weary march through peer review. However, there are limited methods for individuals sifting through this avalanche of research to identify the preprints that are most relevant to their interests. Here, we describe Rxivist.org, a website that indexes all preprints posted to bioRxiv.org, the largest preprint server in the life sciences, and allows users to filter and sort papers based on download metrics and Twitter activity over a variety of categories and time periods. In this work, we hope to make it easier for readers to find relevant research on bioRxiv and to improve the visibility of preprints currently being read and discussed online., This Community Page article describes Rxivist.org, a new website that indexes all preprints posted to bioRxiv.org and allows users to filter and sort papers based on download metrics and Twitter activity over a variety of categories and time periods.

Amid the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, preprints in the biomedical sciences are being posted and accessed at unprecedented rates, drawing widespread attention from the general public, press, and policymakers for the first time. This phenomenon has sharpened long-standing questions about the reliability of information shared prior to journal peer review. Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through April 30, 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response. We utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article changed between the preprinted and published version. We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 7.2% of non-COVID-19–related and 17.2% of COVID-19–related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not qualitatively change the conclusions of the paper., During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints in the biomedical sciences are being posted and accessed at unprecedented rates, but can we trust them? This study reveals that the majority of preprints published within the first 4 months of the pandemic are comparable to their published version.

Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper's social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user’s followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from nonspecialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints appear to intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist in which extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing the public discourse surrounding scientific research., Analysis of Twitter data for 1,800 bioRxiv preprints to classify the online communities engaging with biological research enables the tracing of each preprint's exposure to various academic disciplines and non-specialist audiences, potentially indicating downstream scientific and societal impacts, and revealing that some preprints receive extraordinarily high engagement from white nationalist communities.