Nature Precedings articles cited in traditional journals
Santosh Patnaik
Thursday, 21 February 2008 08:16 UTC
Though it may be too early (considering Nature Precedings is barely eight months old), has anyone seen a Nature Precedings article cited in an original, peer-reviewed research or review article in the traditional academic media?
With a little search I did find an article being mentioned in a news report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute [Jan 2008; 100(2) 88-89]. Atleast one article has been mentioned in the traditional popular media (Fox News story).
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Replies
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Looking through Google Scholar, there are a couple of citations in the published literature.
- Young Ju Suh, Hye-Soon Lee, Franak Batliwalla and Wentian Li. A comparison of founder-only and all-pedigree-members genotype-expression association by regression analysis. BMC Proceedings 2007, 1(Suppl 1):S8
cites: Yaning Yang, Elaine Remmers, Chukwuma Ogunwole, Daniel Kastner, Peter Gregersen, and Wentian Li. Effective Sample Size: Quick Estimation of the Effect of Related Samples in Genetic Case-Control Association Analyses
- M. Djurfeldt, M. Lundqvist, C. Johansson, M. Rehn, Ö. Ekeberg, and A. Lansner. Brain-scale simulation of the neocortex on the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer Applications of Massively Parallel Systems Volume 52, Number 1/2, 2008
cites: Djurfeldt, Mikael and Lansner, Anders. Workshop report: 1st INCF Workshop on Large-scale Modeling of the Nervous System
- Leming Shi, Roger G Perkins, Hong Fang and Weida Tong. Reproducible and reliable microarray results through quality control: good laboratory proficiency and appropriate data analysis practices are essential Current Opinion in Biotechnology Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2008
cites: L. Shi et al. The Reproducibility of Lists of Differentially Expressed Genes in Microarray Studies
In all three of these cases, at least one author is shared between the published article and the Precedings manuscript. However, all three cases were also posted on Precedings within less than a month of the launch of Nature Precedings (June 2007), and the citations were published very recently (Jan 2008—like the JNCI article, which is available here). I’m not that surprised since I suspect that during the first couple of months, not that many people were aware of Nature Precedings as a resource. As Santosh notes, Precedings has only been around for 8 months, while the average citation half life for journals publishing in biochemistry, molecular biology, biology, or cell biology is almost 6 years . (See Thompson Scientific’s Journal Citation Reports)
There are a number of papers posted on Precedings that have later been published in peer-reviewed journals. Of these, we encourage authors to cite the final peer-reviewed version rather than the Nature Precedings version.
- Young Ju Suh, Hye-Soon Lee, Franak Batliwalla and Wentian Li. A comparison of founder-only and all-pedigree-members genotype-expression association by regression analysis. BMC Proceedings 2007, 1(Suppl 1):S8
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Scopus returns six articles citing ‘Nature Precedings’ articles; all different from the ones Hilary mentions in her 23 Feb post.
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Of those 6, it looks like three of them were cited by authors who were not on the Precedings paper. However, the citing publications (2 different ones) were reviews or perspectives. It probably makes sense, and is the natural progression, that first, authors cite their own Precedings papers, followed by outside parties writing reviews. All of this is based on the interacting parameters of prior data knowledge (allowing one to incorporate pre-print findings into a manuscript) and new paper publication turn-around.
Reviews typically have a faster turn-around time from writing to publication. Therefore, since article publication turn-around is so slow, it looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer before a primary research paper from a third-party group cites a Precedings submission.
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I’ve discovered a new (to me) forum on Nature Network called Citation in Science. I think it is great to have a focus to discuss the issues in Allan’s topic list (at the link). Please join if you are interested in continuing the conversation there.
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Hi Santosh,
Thanks for sharing your experience. Searching again on Scopus now shows 16 citations to preprints on Nature Precedings (which doesn’t include the JBC article you mention above).One citation in Scopus caught my eye: a citation from ‘The evolution of animal chemosensory receptor gene repertoires: Roles of chance and necessity’ in the Dec 2008 issue of Nature Reviews Genetics. This article cites “An olfactory receptor pseudogene whose function emerged in humans.” by Peter Lai et al. (posted Nov 5, 2007). The article by Lai et al. was later published in the Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics in their Dec 2008 issue (available online Sept 19, 2008). The article by Lai et al. was most likely not available for public download when authors of the NRG article wrote their manuscript. I don’t know how to determine this, but it would be interesting to see if having a fairly high profile review mentioning Lai et al.’s work co-published with their article makes a difference in the citation rate of the published article.
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