arXiv e-prints and the journal of record: An analysis of roles and relationships

Since its creation in 1991, arXiv has become central to the diffusion of research in a number of fields. Combining data from the entirety of arXiv and the Web of Science (WoS), this paper investigates (a) the proportion of papers across all disciplines that are on arXiv and the proportion of arXiv papers that are in the WoS, (b) elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication, and (c) the aging characteristics and scientific impact of arXiv e-prints and their published version. It shows that the proportion of WoS papers found on arXiv varies across the specialties of physics and mathematics, and that only a few specialties make extensive use of the repository. Elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication has shortened but remains longer in mathematics than in physics. In physics, mathematics, as well as in astronomy and astrophysics, arXiv versions are cited more promptly and decay faster than WoS papers. The arXiv versions of papers—both published and unpublished—have lower citation rates than published papers, although there is almost no difference in the impact of the arXiv versions of both published and unpublished papers. Introduction Preprints—“temporary documents whose function is to bridge the time-gap created by publication delays” (Goldschmidt-Clermont, 1965, p. 8)—are a well-established mechanism for the exchange of scientific information (Mikhailov, Chernyi, & Giliarevskii, 1984). This is particularly true in astronomy and physics, disciplines that have long used preprints to communicate research results (Brooks, 2009; Brown, 2001; Kling, 2005; Wilson, 1970) and establish priority claims, thereby effectively reducing the role of the journal to “secondary distribution, archiving, and peer review” (Brooks, 2009, p. 92). Advocates of open access view subject repositories, such as arXiv, as heralding the eventual demise of the scholarly journal and have outlined ways in which peer review might function on these new platforms (Rodriguez, Bollen, & Van de Sompel, 2006), while others look forward to “the stranglehold journal publishers have over science libraries” being broken (Carriveau, 2008, p. 73). Hence the question: can or need these two forms of scholarly communication co-exist (Morris, 2003)? First a word of caution: one should not be blinded by enthusiasm for the new. Preprints, after all, are far from novel. By way of illustration, preprints were cited as far back as 1922 in a Physical Review paper, and the Information Exchange groups, run by the National Institutes of Health, circulated already more than 1.5 million preprints in the mid-sixties (Confrey, 1996). Moreover, relatively few scholars, with physicists and mathematicians being notable exceptions, use preprints extensively (Swan & Brown, 2003). Lastly, what appears to work as a publishing model in one field may not translate to another (Kling, Spector, & Fortuna, 2004; Kling, Spector, & McKim, 2002). Since its creation by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, arXiv has become central to the diffusion of research in a number of related fields, physics, mathematics, and computer science in particular (Gentil-Ceccot, 1 Mckeehan, L.W. (1922). The crystal structure of silver-paladium and silver-gold alloys. Physical Review, 20(5), 424432. Mele, & Brooks, 2009). Previous research has examined the use made of arXiv (Brown, 2001), ordering and citation rates (Dietrich, 2008a, 2008b; Haque & Ginsparg, 2009), the coexistence of eprints and journals (Henneken et al., 2007), and the effect of arXiv on citation rates (Moed, 2007). However, data from all of arXiv and the Web of Science (WoS) database have yet to be combined for a comparative analysis. This paper combines the entire arXiv repository with the entire WoS database in order to better understand the ecology of scholarly communication. More specifically, we investigate (a) the proportion of papers across all disciplines that are on arXiv, (b) the elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication, and (c) the aging characteristics and scientific impact of arXiv e-prints and their alter egos (the versions published in the journal of record). This last analysis is performed on a subset of the dataset comprising papers published in astronomy and astrophysics.