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Review
. 2020 Sep;27(5):418-426.
doi: 10.1053/j.ackd.2020.08.003. Epub 2020 Aug 6.

Proliferation of Papers and Preprints During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic: Progress or Problems With Peer Review?

Caitlyn Vlasschaert  1 , Joel M Topf  2 , Swapnil Hiremath  3
Affiliations
Review

Proliferation of Papers and Preprints During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic: Progress or Problems With Peer Review?

Caitlyn Vlasschaert et al. Adv Chronic Kidney Dis. 2020 Sep.

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread exponentially throughout the world in a short period, aided by our hyperconnected world including global trade and travel. Unlike previous pandemics, the pace of the spread of the virus has been matched by the pace of publications, not just in traditional journals, but also in preprint servers. Not all publication findings are true, and sifting through the firehose of data has been challenging to peer reviewers, editors, as well as to consumers of the literature, that is, scientists, healthcare workers, and the general public. There has been an equally exponential rise in the public discussion on social media. Rather than decry the pace of change, we suggest the nephrology community should embrace it, making deposition of research into preprint servers the default, encouraging prepublication peer review more widely of such preprint studies, and harnessing social media tools to make these actions easier and seamless.

Keywords: Blog posts; COVID-19; Critical appraisal; Peer review; Preprints; Twitter.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) Research publications on COVID-19, from https://covid19primer.com/dashboard, accessed on May 26, 2020. (B) Accession data for pageviews for the NephJC blog page (www.nephjc.com) on a monthly basis for the last 12 months. The blog posts for COVID-19 received more than 300,000 pageviews in 1 month alone.
Supplemental Figure 1
Supplemental Figure 1
Summary of the NephJC on “COVID and the Kidney.” Held in partnership with the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) on March 17th at 9 pm EDT (American chat), March 18th at 9 pm GMT (European chat), and at 9 pm IST (Asian chat). There were 491 participants and 2386 Tweets across all 3 chats.
Supplemental Figure 2
Supplemental Figure 2
A schematic depicting the traditional model of journal publishing (top) and the current evolving version, to demonstrate how preprints and social media fit and fundamentally change knowledge dissemination.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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