Category Archives: Resource Highlights

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NIH Preprint Pilot to Include Preprints Reporting On All NIH-funded Research Starting In Early 2023

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Launched 35 years ago in August 1997, PubMed reached the remarkable milestone of adding its 35 millionth citation on December 12th, 2022. Contributing to that content since June 2020 have been the “more than 3,300 preprints reporting NIH-supported COVID-19 research discoverable in PubMed Central (PMC) and PubMed”.

The good news for authors is that the number preprints added to PubMed will continue to grow since:

“The success of the pilot has encouraged NLM to extend the pilot in a second phase to launch in early 2023 that will encompass all preprints reporting on NIH-funded research. For preprints that are authored by NIH-funded researchers and voluntarily posted to eligible preprint servers on or after January 1, 2023, NLM will automatically include the full text of the preprint (as license terms allow) and associated citation information available in PMC and PubMed, respectively.”

For more detailed information from the NIH/NLM – see:

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library!

New Preprint-related Developments at eLife

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Since the COVID pandemic, preprint servers have become increasingly accepted within the publishing landscape, with even literature databases (like PubMed and Scopus) taking on the task of selectively indexing some of this new type of “not-yet-confirmed by peer-review” content. No doubt, since preprint servers are outlets for “the distribution of preprints that are complete but unpublished manuscripts describing health research”, this has been a big step for scholarly research database providers.

The increased popularity of preprints has also inspired both scholarly publishers and other research stakeholders to start re-imagining how the scientific research peer-reviewed publishing process in general might be improved now that preprints are often in the mix. For example, the publishers of the open access journal eLife, who have been actively trying to bring on the evolution of publishing by experimenting with new publishing processes/models since their inception 10 years ago, have made some noteworthy changes related to preprints over the last two years that are worth paying attention to.

In a rather radical move, in July 2021, eLife began ONLY reviewing manuscripts that had already been posted as preprints (on bioRxiv or medRxiv), deciding to “focus its editorial process on producing public reviews to be posted alongside the preprints”. Fast-forward 18 months, and starting in January 2023, the eLife editorial process will altogether “eliminate accept/reject decisions after peer review and instead provide readers with richer and more nuanced assessments of articles”, which they will call “eLife assessments”. In short, every preprint that is sent out for review by eLife editors will be published as a “Reviewed Preprint”, after which the authors may choose to undertake revisions and will be involved in deciding which manuscript version will become the final version of record (ie. the final published version that will be indexed in scholarly databases).

Note: These are just the “headline” highlights – to learn more in-depth details about eLife’s new publishing process, be sure to read:

Questions? Ask Us at the MSK Library!

Covidence Full-Text PDF Enhancements

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Covidence, the systematic review (SR) project management tool that is available for use by everyone in the MSK community via a site license, has recently introduced some noteworthy improvements related to importing the PDF attachments for the full-text screening stage.

  • You can now export only the records of citations missing the Full-Text PDFs.

Being able to easily extract a list of citations of studies missing full text PDFs does not sound like a game-changing enhancement. However, for SR team members who regularly dedicate hours of work harvesting the full-text PDFs for the Full-Text Screening stage of a project, this functionality will be a huge time-saver.

  • You can now export citations as an RIS file for import into reference manager programs beyond Endnote, including:

    1. Endnote
    2. Cochrane Registry of Studies
    3. Zotero
    4. Mendeley
    5. RefWorks

With an increasing number of citation manager program options available to users, including here at MSK – see Citation Management LibGuide for more details – it is nice to see that Covidence is becoming inter-operable with more tools to better match user preferences.

  • You can now bring in Open Access articles using Unpaywall and automatically upload them when studies move to to the Full Text screening or Data Extraction stages.

With the amount of available Open Access journal content continuously increasing, having the ability to automatically bring in the needed full-text that is openly-available on the web will become even more useful as time goes on. Furthermore, individual PDFs that users have already downloaded can now be brought into Covidence using a convenient drag and drop option, making adding these PDFs to their corresponding citation records on the screening list easier than ever.

  • You can now use the Bulk PDF Upload Tool in conjunction with either Endnote or Zotero.

The Bulk PDF Upload Tool involves a two step process that includes saving a list of citation records as an Endnote XML file after all of the needed PDFs have been harvested into a citation manager. Zotero now also accommodates the “Endnote XML” filetype, helping Covidence once again become more versatile for users who choose to use the Zotero citation manager instead of Endnote.

To learn more about Covidence, be sure to check out these training options or Ask Us at the MSK Library.