in brief
Preprint or perish
How often you are cited by other authors is still crucial for your career development. But the publication system is currently undergoing massive restructuring, thanks to preprints and Open Access, as the following figures show.
Image: Bodara
250,000
is the number of downloads that the online repository Biorxiv recorded for the preprint article that first announced the novel coronavirus to the world of science. It was only formally published 11 days later.
1991
was the year when the physicist Paul Ginsparg of the Los Alamos National Laboratory launched the first-ever online repository for preprints in the field of physics. In 2001 it was renamed Arxiv, and today also contains articles on maths, IT, statistics and quantitative biology.
71%
of the citations in two specialist journals in 2019 were of articles from the same journal. For this reason, they were excluded from the index service measuring the impact factor of specialist publications – as were 31 other journals that also demonstrated abnormal citation patterns.
9%
of US research publications come from the University of California (UC). As of 2021, all UC research published by Springer Nature will be put on Open Access.
