bioRxiv 2017 update

Tim Stuart 2017-10-04 2 minute read

collection_date <- ymd("2017_10_04")

dat <- fread("~/Documents/GitHub/biorxivData/data/biorxiv_data_2017_10_04.tsv") %>% 
  mutate(Age = collection_date - ymd(`Original submission`),
         Revised = `Original submission` != `Current submission`)

Submissions over time

weekly <- dat %>%
  mutate(weeks_past = ceiling(Age / 7),
         `Submission week` = collection_date - weeks(weeks_past)) %>% 
  group_by(`Submission week`) %>%
  summarise(Submissions = n())

ggplot(weekly, aes(`Submission week`, Submissions)) +
  geom_point(stat = "identity") +
  geom_smooth() +
  ggtitle("bioRxiv submissions per week") +
  theme_bw()

Last year the number of weekly submissions peaked at around 60, now it’s 5x higher hitting 300 per week earlier in 2017.

How many of these submissions get revised?

dat %>% 
  group_by(Revised) %>%
  summarise(n = n(), `%` = n/nrow(dat) * 100)

## # A tibble: 2 x 3
##   Revised     n   `%`
##   <lgl>   <int> <dbl>
## 1 FALSE   10603  72.4
## 2 TRUE     4042  27.6

This is almost exactly the same percentage as I found last year.

2017 highlights

What have been the most popular preprints so far this year?

days <- collection_date - ymd('2017-01-01')

dat %>%
  filter(Age < days) %>% 
  arrange(desc(`PDF views`)) %>% 
  head(10) %>% 
  select(Title)

##                                                                                                           Title
## 1                                         Opportunities And Obstacles For Deep Learning In Biology And Medicine
## 2  Index Switching Causes “Spreading-Of-Signal” Among Multiplexed Samples In Illumina HiSeq 4000 DNA Sequencing
## 3                  Regulation of Life Span by the Gut Microbiota in The Short-Lived African Turquoise Killifish
## 4                         Sex Differences In The Adult Human Brain: Evidence From 5,216 UK Biobank Participants
## 5                                         The Reproducibility Of Research And The Misinterpretation Of P Values
## 6         Major flaws in "Identification of individuals by trait prediction using whole-genome sequencing data"
## 7                                      The Beaker Phenomenon And The Genomic Transformation Of Northwest Europe
## 8                                                                    The Genomic History Of Southeastern Europe
## 9                                                                                          The Human Cell Atlas
## 10    Comprehensive single cell transcriptional profiling of a multicellular organism by combinatorial indexing

Some really topical stuff (not surprisingly): p-value controversies, single cell genomics, the index-switching catastrophe, and the recent Venter debacle.

Data

The data is available on my github to explore.