"It found that researchers posted, on average, 1,711 preprints a month to bioRxiv in the first 11 months of 2018.

"It also found that there were a total of 1.1 million downloads last October alone — a record high, says Richard Abdill and Ran Blekhman, bioinformatics researchers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The number of authors posting a preprint for the first time increased from 3,873 in 2014 to 84,339 in 2018. The total number of bioRxiv preprint authors rose from 4,012 to 106,231 over the same period (see ‘March of the preprint’).

"Most of the preprints that were posted and downloaded are in the fields of neuroscience and bioinformatics. Evolutionary biology, genetics, genomics and microbiology also feature in the top ten fields."