PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Swarup Satish
AU  - Zonghai Yao
AU  - Andrew Drozdov
AU  - Boris Veytsman
TI  - The impact of preprint servers in the formation of novel ideas
AID  - 10.1101/2020.10.08.330696
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.10.08.330696
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/08/2020.10.08.330696.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/08/2020.10.08.330696.full
AB  - We study whether novel ideas in biomedical literature appear first in preprints or traditional journals. We develop a Bayesian method to estimate the time of appearance for a phrase in the literature, and apply it to a number of phrases, both automatically extracted and suggested by experts. We see that presently most phrases appear first in the traditional journals, but there is a number of phrases with the first appearance on preprint servers. A comparison of the general composition of texts from bioRxiv and traditional journals shows a growing trend of bioRxiv being predictive of traditional journals. We discuss the application of the method for related problems.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.