The Rise and Fall: impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on bioRxiv preprints

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, different countries are experiencing various restrictions including lockdowns. Some of these restrictions alter our ability to do science: by hindering lab access or taking time away from researchers for homeschooling. So, what impact has the pandemic had on scientific output? One way to look at this – for biology – […]

Culture Move: new preprint on cell migration

We have a new preprint out. This is a short post to describe our findings and highlight some of the software I developed for analysing cell migration and cell shape data. Intracellular nanovesicles mediate integrin trafficking during cell migration bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2020.08.19.257287 It is mainly the work of Gabrielle Larocque with help from Penny La-Borde […]

Take Off: preprints on COVID-19

I’m posting this the morning after generating a graph, and it’s already out-of-date. During the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak, preprint servers such as bioRxiv and medRxiv have again shown that they are the most effective way of communicating science rapidly. A collection of all papers on COVID-19 deposited on these two servers is available here, and […]

Scoop: some practical advice

So quantixed occasionally gets correspondence from other researchers asking for advice. A recent email came from someone who had been “scooped”. What should they do? Before we get into this topic we have to define what we mean by being scooped. In the most straightforward sense being scooped means that an article appeared online before […]

Methods papers for MD997

I am now running a new module for masters students, MD997. The aim is to introduce the class to a range of advanced research methods and to get them to think about how to formulate their own research question(s). The module is built around a paper which is allocated in the first session. I had […]

White label: the growth of bioRxiv

bioRxiv, the preprint server for biology, recently turned 2 years old. This seems a good point to take a look at how bioRxiv has developed over this time and to discuss any concerns sceptical people may have about using the service. Firstly, thanks to Richard Sever (@cshperspectives) for posting the data below. The first plot shows the number of […]