Tag Archives: preprint

Is peer review overrated? Are journals superfluous?

These are my questions when reading the Nature news article although it has a quite different title “Think preprints are unreliable? Analysis of 70,000 studies might change your mind”.

The central conclusions of biomedical preprints rarely change following peer review in a journal, according to a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv this month. The research also found that studies that appeared first as preprints are retracted at roughly half the rate of papers that did not appear online before being in a peer-reviewed journal. The authors say the findings suggests that preprints are a reliable source of information, although some scientists say the finding should be interpreted more cautiously.

It is all about this preprint

The primary claim was unchanged in 39.9% of abstracts, minorly revised in 50.0%, and substantially revised in only 10.2%.

Fits my experience, 90% more or less unchanged.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 17.07.2026

PubPeer should be merged into Pubmed (at some time point)

PubMed had an own comments feature “PubMed Commons” which had been shut down in 2018.

NIH announced it will be discontinuing the service - which allowed only signed comments from authors with papers indexed in PubMed, among other restrictions - after more than four years, due to a lack of interest.

But there is no lack of interest, if we look at the ever increasing rates at PubPeer – the counter today is 122.000.

The main difference between PubMed Commons and PubPeer is the chance of submitting anonymous comments. While I also see a risk of unjustified accusations or online stalking, I believe that the current PubPeer coordinators handle this issue very well. We can post only issues that are obvious, directly visible or backed up by another source. Continue reading PubPeer should be merged into Pubmed (at some time point)

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 17.07.2026