Preprinting is positively associated with early career researcher status in ecology and evolution
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The usage of preprint servers in ecology and evolution is increasing, allowing research to be rapidly disseminated and available through open access at no cost. Early Career Researchers (ECRs) often have limited experience with the peer review process, which can be challenging when trying to build publication records and demonstrate research ability for funding opportunities, scholarships, grants, or faculty positions. ECRs face different challenges relative to researchers with permanent positions and established research programs. These challenges might also vary according to institution size and country, which are factors associated with the availability of funding for open access journals. We predicted that the career stage and institution size impact the relative usage of preprint servers among researchers in ecology and evolution. Using data collected from 500 articles (100 from each of two open access journals, two closed access journals, and a preprint server), we showed that ECRs generated more preprints relative to non-ECRs, for both first and last authors. We speculate that this pattern is reflective of the advantages of quick and open access research that is disproportionately beneficial to ECRs. There is also a marginal association between first author, institution size, and preprint usage, whereby the number of preprints tends to increase with institution size for ECRs. The United States and United Kingdom contributed the greatest number of preprints by ECRs, whereas non-Western countries contributed relatively fewer preprints. This empirical evidence that preprint usage varies with the career stage, institution size, and country helps to identify barriers surrounding large-scale adoption of preprinting in ecology and evolution.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it