The central conclusions of biomedical preprints rarely change following peer review in a journal1, according to a study posted on the preprint server bioRxiv this month. The research also found that studies that appeared first as preprints are retracted at roughly half the rate of papers that did not appear online before being in a peer-reviewed journal. The authors say the findings suggests that preprints are a reliable source of information, although some scientists say the finding should be interpreted more cautiously. Posting preprints is common practice in science these days, but Ruslan Rust, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, says that he often hears fellow scientists say that they are unreliable. In his experience, peer review does not typically lead to major changes in the contents of a study. Rust wanted to see if this held true across different fields of biomedical research. Using a large language model (LLM), Rust and his colleague...
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