Basic Analysis of Twitter Users Sharing Preprints During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The open access of research papers has become widespread, and opportunities for non-researchers to access the papers are increasing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, papers of the author's version are sometimes published on preprint servers, and there are many tweets about these preprints on Twitter. In this study, about the mention to preprint servers on Twitter, we focus on three sites, arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, and conduct preliminary analysis. As a result of the analysis, we found that many mentions of arXiv were not retweets and that many bots were active. We also found that medRxiv was mentioned by a large number of users, and it tended to be more noticeable than other preprint servers.