“(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention”

Nearly half of our applicant survey respondents reported posting at least 1 preprint, with several commenting that preprinting provided evidence of productivity outside of formal publication. A number of applicants commented that preprinting provided evidence of productivity outside of formal publication. Search committee survey respondents further confirmed that while published papers carry the most weight, preprints are generally viewed favorably. Future use of preprints as evidence of productivity records may have significant positive impacts on early career researchers, for whom timing of publications and job searches require critical considerations.

Our limited survey of the search committee faculty members provided various insights. The majority (67%) said preprints were viewed favorably, although their strength may not be equivalent to published peer-reviewed work (Table S33).

Preprints, or manuscripts submitted to an open-access server prior to peer-reviewed publication, are becoming increasingly popular among early career researchers, particularly in the life sciences (33,34,35) and are shown to boost article citations and mentions (29–31,37). We opted to address whether this increase in preprint submissions had an impact on the academic job market. While not all respondents answered our questions about preprints, we did receive 270 responses on this issue. Our survey data showed that 55% of these respondents (148 candidates) had posted at least one preprint throughout their career and 20% had posted between 2-6 preprints with an average of 1.57 preprints per person throughout their career thus far (Figure 2E, Table S8, S15). At the time of faculty job application, 40% of these respondents had an active preprint that was not yet published in a journal, with an average of 0.69 active preprints per person. Preprinted research was enormously helpful for a number of candidates (who explicitly commented) that preprints served to demonstrate productivity before their paper was published (Tables S26, S27).

https://doi.org/10.1101/833400

The sample of 776 published articles with preprints was matched to 3647 published articles without preprints. Published articles with preprints had significantly higher Altmetric scores than published articles without preprints (median, 9.5 [IQR, 3.1 to 35.3] vs 3.5 [IQR, 0.8 to 12.2], respectively; between-group difference, 4 [IQR, 0 to 15]; P < .001) and received more citations (median, 4 [IQR, 1 to 10] vs 3 [IQR, 1 to 7]; between-group difference, 1 [IQR, −1 to 5]; P < .001).