Preprints and Publication: How the Covid-19 Pandemic Affected the Quality of Scientific Production

An interesting paper recently published in Peer J. by Enrique Teran and coworkers casts light on a peculiar side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic that concerns the quality of articles that appeared as preprints in archives or as regular papers in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. The authors report a detailed perusal of the scientific publications related to research on Covid-19 in a portion of the year 2020. What emerges from the study is that over the total number of preprints uploaded in the archives' servers, that are not subjected to a formal peer-review process, only about 5.7% were later converted into regular articles and published in scholarly journals after a regular peer-review process. The statistics is based on a global sample of 5,061 preprints uploaded in three different archives