关键词: 预印本, 作者分析, 学术年龄, 影响力评价, 作者选择偏好, 科学计量学

Abstract: This paper reveals the dominant force in the development of preprint from the perspective of the preprint authors. By comprehensively using the bibliometrics, altmetrics and statistics methods, an empirical analysis of the 15313 arXiv and 43669 non-arXiv papers in Mathematics is conducted from four dimensions: the active countries and institutions for preprint publishing, the authors’ academic age, the scholarly and social impact of preprints and self-selection bias of preprints, and results show that: (a) The level of the uptake of preprints varies considerably across countries/regions and organizations: the United States, France, Germany, China, and the United Kingdom are active supporters of the preprint publishing, while the adoption of preprints by researchers in China is relatively low; (b) Preprint publishing is mainly driven by young academic age researchers, especially in China, where the proportion of young researchers among preprint authors is significantly higher than the word average; (c) Preprints impact is characterized by the authors’ countries, among which China shows the most special pattern, that is the usage counts in WoS are significantly higher than the citation counts of preprints, which is contrary to the overall trend of the world; (d) Preprint authors tend to deposit a preprint version of journal papers published in journals with higher impact factor than those with lower impact factor.

Key words: preprints, author analysis, academic age, impact evaluation, self-selection bias, scientometrics