Revision and academic impact: A case study of bioRxiv preprint papers

Abstract

Scientific papers are the essential carrier for disseminating knowledge in the scientific communication system. It is believed that in addition to deepening the scientific attainments in one's research field, the writing and revision of the manuscripts are also very important. This paper tries to quantitatively describe the revision process and the relationship between revision and academic impact. We acquire the different manuscript versions of the published scientific papers from bioRxiv platform, analyze the characteristics of the time (away from publication) and location (sections) of paper revisions, and explore the correlation between revision and impact using multiple linear regression. We find that 75 % or more of revisions occur within one year before publication, and 40 % or more of revisions take place in the last 3 months, which illustrates to a certain extent the importance of expert review in revising (and improving) research papers. Further, we find that the revision degree of papers has a significant correlation with academic impact, and elaborate revision of introduction plays a major role in acquiring academic impact for a research paper. We believe our results can provide a basis for guiding authors to enhance the academic impact of papers through scientific writing, and provide clues for the development of journal publishers and preprint platforms from the perspective of paper quality control and influence improvement.