Future citations among preprints

Much of scholarly communication involves exchange of preprints: drafts of articles that have not yet been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal. In the last 30 years, preprints have been distributed electronically, especially on preprint databases such as arXiv, medRxiv, bioRxiv and SocArXiv. Researchers can share draft articles on these servers and update them with revisions throughout the editorial process.

Bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of written publications. Citation analysis may involve modelling the flow of citations around a network of publications to identify articles, authors or journals that are particularly prominent within a particular community. Ordinarily a paper can only cite older papers. But electronic preprints give rise to citing ‘into the future’, where a preprint is updated to include references to works that have a later publication date.

This project will, through analysis of preprint citation data, explore this phenomenon and attempt to describe how it varies over time and between fields.

References

• Saier, T., & Färber, M. (2019). Bibliometric-Enhanced arXiv: A Data Set for Paper-Based and Citation-Based Tasks. BIR@ECIR. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:128356991