COVID-19-Related manuscripts: lag from preprint to publication

Preprints have had a prominent role in the swift scientific response to COVID-19. Two years into the pandemic, we investigated how much preprints had contributed to timely data sharing by analyzing the lag time from preprint posting to journal publication.

To estimate the median number of days between the date a manuscript was posted as a preprint and the date of its publication in a scientific journal, we analyzed preprints posted from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2021 in the NIH iSearch COVID-19 Portfolio database and performed a Kaplan-Meier (KM) survival analysis using a non-mixture parametric cure model. Of the 39,243 preprints in our analysis, 7712 (20%) were published in a journal, after a median lag of 178 days (95% CI: 175-181). Most of the published preprints were posted on the bioRxiv (29%) or medRxiv (65%) servers, which allow authors to choose a subject category when posting. Of the 20,698 preprints posted on these two servers, 7358 (36%) were published, including approximately half of those categorized as biochemistry, biophysics, and genomics, which became published articles within the study interval, compared with 29% categorized as epidemiology and 26% as bioinformatics.