An evaluation of the preprints produced at the beginning of the 2022 mpox public health emergency
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
BACKGROUND: Preprints are scientific articles that have not undergone the peer-review process. They allow the latest evidence to be rapidly shared, however it is unclear whether they can be confidently used for decision-making during a public health emergency. This study aimed to compare the data and quality of preprints released during the first four months of the 2022 mpox outbreak to their published versions. METHODS: Eligible preprints (n = 76) posted between May to August 2022 were identified through an established mpox literature database and followed to July 2024 for changes in publication status. Quality of preprints and published studies was assessed by two independent reviewers to evaluate changes in quality, using validated tools that were available for the study design (n = 33). Tools included the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale; Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies 2 (QUADAS-2); and JBI Critical Appraisal Checklists. The questions in each tool led to an overall quality assessment of high quality (no concerns with study design, conduct, and/or analysis), moderate quality (minor concerns) or low quality (several concerns). Changes in data (e.g. methods, outcomes, results) for preprint-published pairs (n = 60) were assessed by one reviewer and verified by a second. RESULTS: Preprints and published versions that could be evaluated for quality (n = 25 pairs) were mostly assessed as low quality. Minimal to no change in quality from preprint to published was identified: all observational studies (10/10), most case series (6/7) and all surveillance data analyses (3/3) had no change in overall quality, while some diagnostic test accuracy studies (3/5) improved or worsened their quality assessment scores. Among all pairs (n = 60), outcomes were often added in the published version (58%) and less commonly removed (18%). Numerical results changed from preprint to published in 53% of studies, however most of these studies (22/32) had changes that were minor and did not impact main conclusions of the study. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests the minimal changes in quality, results and main conclusions from preprint to published versions supports the use of preprints, and the use of the same critical evaluation tools on preprints as applied to published studies, in decision-making during a public health emergency.
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.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | MetaresearchScholarly communicationOpen science Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
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 | 0.277 | 0.095 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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