Research analytics provider Clarivate adds a PrePrint Citation Index to its Web of Science database

This immediately includes two million preprint papers, from STEM platforms, including arXiv. There are holdings from 12 more to come this year.

Clarivate is quick to make clear that papers from the new index are identified as preprints and are not included in citation counts or for the journal impact factor.

The pace of preprints accelerated, for good and ill, when the pandemic created a need for speed that the journal review process could not meet.

As Merlin Crossley put it (CMM November 10 2022), “the two big problems with modern peer review are: the slow successive “desk rejections” as the manuscript descends a connoisseur’s ladder of prestige, and the mountains of extra experiments required to prove the work is worthy of increasingly competitive top journals – and as science expands globally it is increasingly competitive.”