Career effects of preprints get mixed reviews from biomedical researchers

From ScienceMag:

Nearly half of biomedical scientists worry preprints could spread shoddy research and misinformation, according to a new survey that could help explain why the life sciences have taken up the publishing practice more slowly than some other fields.

The survey is one of the largest to date to examine views of life sciences researchers on the practice of placing non–peer-reviewed manuscripts on public servers. The results, posted this week on the bioRxiv preprint server, also reveal that researchers on average do not believe publishing preprints enhances their career advancement. But many acknowledge benefits, such as spreading their findings more quickly than peer-review journals do and helping them find collaborators.

“This study makes a valuable contribution because it highlights the persistent tension between the benefits of rapid dissemination and the way research is evaluated,” says Jeremy Ng of University Hospital Tübingen, who studies health research methodology and was not involved in the new study. “Hiring, promotion, and funding decisions often still revolve around traditional journal publications.”

Biomedical preprints have become more common over the past decade and spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. But previous studies have indicated larger shares of physicists and economists regularly post preprints than researchers in the life sciences. “We wanted to know what is stopping the [biomedical] community from adopting them to a larger extent,” says information scientist Chaoqun Ni of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who led the new study.

The survey, completed by nearly 1800 biomedical researchers in the United States and Canada in early 2025, reveals substantial variations in the use of preprinting. Two-thirds of respondents read at least one preprint during the previous 2 years. Only about half of respondents had submitted one in that time span, and only one-third had cited a preprint. Junior scientists were more likely to embrace these practices.

Among respondents not reading or citing preprints, the most common reason was concerns over quality. Among all survey takers, 42% predicted a strongly negative effect on science from preprints that spread misinformation. In comments submitted with their survey answers, some respondents voiced strong reservations about the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI). “Professors [could] mass-generate preprints with AI,” wrote an unnamed associate professor. These could “crowd out legitimate scholars who are publishing at a slower pace because they are actually doing real studies and going through peer review.”

Worries about quality may come disproportionately from clinical researchers concerned that the lack of independent vetting of preprints could jeopardize patient safety, says Richard Sever, chief science and strategy officer at openRxiv, a nonprofit that operates the widely used bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint servers devoted to biomedical science. (The new study does not report responses separately by subdiscipline.)

But concerns over quality may be based more on researchers’ impressions than evidence, Sever says, noting that bioRxiv and medRxiv reject submissions that don’t use the scientific method or that pose obvious risks to public health. Preprinting a fraudulent manuscript exposes it to more scrutiny than if it appeared only in a journal, he adds. “If you get a reputation for being the person who always puts up stuff [on preprint servers] which doesn’t have complete data and is shoddy, then you’re done in academia.” What’s more, some 80% of preprints eventually appear in peer-reviewed journals. And despite their quality checks, journals publish problematic papers, he says.

Respondents to Ni’s survey also saw upsides to preprinting, with about half agreeing it can accelerate the dissemination of scientific findings compared with journals, where peer review can take months and much of the content is paywalled. That finding echoes results of a survey of 7000 bioRxiv and medRxiv users, conducted by openRxiv in 2023 and posted on 26 February, in which respondents praised fast dissemination of findings as a top benefit.

Only about 16% of respondents agreed strongly that preprints reduce the importance that professional evaluators—those who review grant applications or make hiring and tenure decisions—place on articles in subscription-based, selective, peer-reviewed journals. Shifting away from traditional journals is a goal that advocates of open science have touted and some funders have embraced. For example, in 2025 the Gates Foundation began requiring grantees to post as preprints all manuscripts that result from research it funds, and it stopped paying for researchers to publish their papers in journals that charge a fee to make papers free.

Still, many universities’ professional review procedures explicitly prefer or require peer-reviewed publications, Ni notes. More than 60% of the survey respondents involved in funding, hiring, or tenure decisions said they give more credit to peer-reviewed papers than preprints; less than 12% said they credit both types equally. “Nobody has time to read preprints from 30 candidates for a position or award to determine their value,” an associate professor wrote in another survey comment. “Thus, we use journal [publications]. At least as a reviewer, we know there has been some bar surpassed.”

To help readers better judge the quality of preprints, Ni’s preprint suggests that preprint server managers find automated ways to summarize the rigor and transparency of each manuscript they post. Ng, who co-authored a 2024 survey of biomedical researchers’ views on preprinting, cautions that any such indicators “would need to strike a careful balance [to] avoid the oversimplification of research quality into a single score or checklist.” He argues professional evaluators need to judge the transparency and rigor of applicants’ research for themselves. “If institutions want to encourage open science practices, they need to ensure that researchers are not penalized, either explicitly or implicitly, for sharing their work early.”

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