Abstract
Researchers initiated immediate research on COVID-19 following the declaration of the pandemic, but the traditional cycle of scientific information distribution was ill-equipped to share rapid outputs. Preprints provided a platform for immediate sharing of outputs, leading many COVID-19 studies in medical biology and clinical medicine to be submitted in this format. Preprints were collected from bioRxiv and medRxiv, and metadata of published preprints were collected from PubMed. We investigated the number of published preprints submitted by country and metadata for the peer review period for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 preprints. Our research found preprints from 128 countries. Submissions peaked in May 2020, five months following the declaration of the pandemic. Using the Mann-Whitney U test, we found the peer review period for COVID-19 published preprints was significantly shorter than for non-COVID-19 preprints. The research suggests many countries have an in-built system that facilitates swift and continuous responses to crises in the scientific community.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP19K12707, JP20K12569, JP22K12737, and ROIS NII Open Collaborative Research 2023 (23FS01).
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Tsunoda, H., Sun, Y., Nishizawa, M., Liu, X., Amano, K., Kominami, R. (2023). The Pivotal Role of Preprint Platforms in Disseminating COVID-19 Research: A Global Investigation of Country-Level Activities. In: Goh, D.H., Chen, SJ., Tuarob, S. (eds) Leveraging Generative Intelligence in Digital Libraries: Towards Human-Machine Collaboration. ICADL 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14458. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8088-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8088-8_7
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