Background: The quality of COVID-19 preprints should be considered with great care, as their contents can influence public policy. Efforts to improve preprint quality have mostly focused on introducing quick peer review, but surprisingly little has been done to calibrate the public’s evaluation of preprints and their contents. The PRECHECK project aimed to generate a tool to teach and guide scientifically literate non-experts to critically evaluate preprints, on COVID-19 and beyond. Methods: To create a checklist, we applied a four-step procedure consisting of an initial internal review, an external review by a pool of experts (methodologists, meta-researchers/experts on preprints, journal editors, and science journalists), a final internal review, and an implementation stage. For the external review step, experts rated the relevance of each element of the checklist on five-point Likert scales, and provided written feedback. After each internal review round, we applied the checklist on a set of high-quality preprints from an online list of milestone research works on COVID-19 and low-quality preprints, which were eventually retracted, to verify whether the checklist can discriminate between the two categories. Results: At the external review step, 26 of the 54 contacted experts responded. The final checklist contained four elements (Research question, study type, transparency and integrity, and limitations), with ‘superficial’ and ‘deep’ levels for evaluation. When using both levels of evaluation, the checklist was effective at discriminating high- from low-quality preprints. Its usability was confirmed in workshops with our target audience: Bachelors students in Psychology and Medicine, and science journalists. Conclusions: We created a simple, easy-to-use tool for helping scientifically literate non-experts navigate preprints with a critical mind. We believe that our checklist has great potential to help guide decisions about the quality of preprints on COVID-19 in our target audience and that this extends beyond COVID-19.

https://f1000research.com/articles/12-588/pdf

Using an expert survey and user feedback to construct PRECHECK: A checklist to evaluate preprints on COVID-19 and beyond

This research aimed at determining the growth of deposition of preprints on servers by Indian researchers during COVID-19 pandemic. In the pre-pandemic period, the dominant server was arXiv upon which research from physics and other related domains have been the most predominant depositors. When the pandemic erupted and the need to share research findings became imperative, many previously dormant preprint servers received vibrant activations from several scientists across the globe. This is with the intention of bridging the gap between delays inherent in reviewing process and the dire need to share information for finding everlasting solutions to the raging pandemic. Many researchers, institutions, countries, etc. have contributed in this regard. The study used quantitative method and iSearch Portfolio expert-curated source for publications and preprints related to either COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 developed and maintained by National Institute of Health (NIH), US iSearch COVID-19 Portfolio. The study examined the Indian COVID-19 preprints deposited in bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint servers. The findings indicated that, Indian researchers have posted their papers in large numbers in bioRxiv and medRxiv servers with the medRxiv having the highest preprints (417, 40.44%) in 2020 against its counterpart bioRxiv (118, 10.96%) in the same year. Similarly, infectious diseases (except HIV/AIDS) (311) had the highest recurrence of the preprints submitted for deposition in servers. This is followed by epidemiology (263), public and global health (122), bioinformatics (59), among others. There is high collaboration among researchers who deposited their preprints in these servers where about 257 (24.93%) preprints were co-authored by 11+ authors followed by 3-authored and 4-authored with 124 preprints respectively (together accounts for 24.06%) and 2-authroed (114 (11.04%) preprints) respectively in a diminishing manner. The study concluded that, Indian researchers are actively participating in depositing preprints in servers notably bioRxiv and medRxiv

/pdf/indian-covid-19-preprints-submissions-in-biorxiv-and-medrxiv-1usvryw2.pdf

Indian COVID-19 Preprints Submissions in bioRxiv and medRxiv Preprint Servers

Background: The quality of COVID-19 preprints should be considered with great care, as their contents can influence public policy. Efforts to improve preprint quality have mostly focused on introducing quick peer review, but surprisingly little has been done to calibrate the public’s evaluation of preprints and their contents. Purpose: The PRECHECK project aimed to generate a tool to teach and guide scientifically literate non-experts to critically evaluate preprints, on COVID-19 and beyond. Methods: To create a checklist, we applied a 4-step procedure consisting of an initial internal review, an external review by a pool of experts (methodologists, meta-researchers/experts on preprints, journal editors, and science journalists), a final internal review, and an implementation stage. For the external review step, experts rated the relevance of each element of the checklist on five-point Likert scales, and provided written feedback. After each internal review round, we applied the checklist on a set of high-quality preprints from an online list of milestone research works on COVID-19 and low-quality preprints, which were eventually retracted, to verify whether the checklist can discriminate between the two categories. Results: At the external review step, 26 of the 54 contacted experts responded. The final checklist contained 4 elements (Research question, Study type, Transparency and integrity, and Limitations), with ‘superficial’ and ‘deep’ levels for evaluation. When using both levels of evaluation, the checklist was effective at discriminating high- from low-quality preprints. Its usability was confirmed in workshops with our target audience: Bachelors students in Psychology and Medicine, and science journalists.Conclusions: We created a simple, easy-to-use tool for helping scientifically literate non-experts navigate preprints with a critical mind. We believe that our checklist has great potential to help guide decisions about the quality of preprints on COVID-19 in our target audience and that this extends beyond COVID-19. 

/pdf/gender-issues-in-the-nuclear-medicine-community-results-from-21ddm8mt.pdf

Gender issues in the nuclear medicine community: results from a survey promoted by the EANM Women Empowerment Task Force

<ns3:p>Background The quality of COVID-19 preprints should be considered with great care, as their contents can influence public policy. Surprisingly little has been done to calibrate the public’s evaluation of preprints and their contents. The PRECHECK project aimed to generate a tool to teach and guide scientifically literate non-experts to critically evaluate preprints, on COVID-19 and beyond. Methods To create a checklist, we applied a four-step procedure consisting of an initial internal review, an external review by a pool of experts (methodologists, meta-researchers/experts on preprints, journal editors, and science journalists), a final internal review, and a Preliminary implementation stage. For the external review step, experts rated the relevance of each element of the checklist on five-point Likert scales, and provided written feedback. After each internal review round, we applied the checklist on a small set of high-quality preprints from an online list of milestone research works on COVID-19 and low-quality preprints, which were eventually retracted, to verify whether the checklist can discriminate between the two categories. Results At the external review step, 26 of the 54 contacted experts responded. The final checklist contained four elements (Research question, study type, transparency and integrity, and limitations), with ‘superficial’ and ‘deep’ evaluation levels. When using both levels, the checklist was effective at discriminating a small set of high- and low-quality preprints. Its usability for assessment and discussion of preprints was confirmed in workshops with Bachelors students in Psychology and Medicine, and science journalists. Conclusions We created a simple, easy-to-use tool for helping scientifically literate non-experts navigate preprints with a critical mind and facilitate discussions within, for example, a beginner-level lecture on research methods. We believe that our checklist has potential to help guide decisions about the quality of preprints on COVID-19 in our target audience and that this extends beyond COVID-19.</ns3:p> 

pdf/using-an-expert-survey-and-user-feedback-to-construct-3lmgyxg2js.pdf

Releasing preprints is a popular way to hasten the speed of research but may carry hidden risks for public discourse. The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel SARS-CoV-2 infection highlighted the risk of rushing the publication of unvalidated findings, leading to damaging scientific miscommunication in the most extreme scenarios. Several high-profile preprints, later found to be deeply flawed, have indeed exacerbated widespread skepticism about the risks of the COVID-19 disease - at great cost to public health. Here, preprint article quality during the pandemic is examined by distinguishing papers related to COVID-19 from other research studies. Importantly, our analysis also investigated possible factors contributing to manuscript quality by assessing the relationship between preprint quality and gender balance in authorship within each research discipline. Using a comprehensive data set of preprint articles from medRxiv and bioRxiv from January to May 2020, we construct both a new index of manuscript quality including length, readability, and spelling correctness and a measure of gender mix among a manuscripts authors. We find that papers related to COVID-19 are less well-written than unrelated papers, but that this gap is significantly mitigated by teams with better gender balance, even when controlling for variation by research discipline. Beyond contributing to a systematic evaluation of scientific publishing and dissemination, our results have broader implications for gender and representation as the pandemic has led female researchers to bear more responsibility for childcare under lockdown, inducing additional stress and causing disproportionate harm to women in science.

https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.14.21258917v1.full.pdf

Gender Balance and Readability of COVID-19 Scientific Publishing: A Quantitative Analysis of 90,000 Preprint Manuscripts

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Gender Balance and Readability of COVID-19 Scientific Publishing: A Quantitative Analysis of 90,000 Preprint Manuscripts