About

Rxivist indexes and sorts metadata from bioRxiv and medRxiv, preprint servers¹ operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. There is no official association between CSHL and this project.

Papers about the Rxivist project:

Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprints. eLife. doi: 10.7554/eLife.45133.
Rxivist.org: Sorting biology preprints using social media and readership metrics. PLOS Biology. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000269.

Twitter data used on the front page is provided by Crossref. Social media interaction data displayed on preprint detail pages is provided by Altmetric.

Rxivist is developed and maintained by the Blekhman Lab at the University of Minnesota. Its source code is available on GitHub in two locations, for the API and this web application. Its main components are:

Python 3, the Bottle web framework and the Requests-HTML module (for web crawling)
PostgreSQL database and the Psycopg SDK
Docker containerization
Bootstrap display elements
Chart.js data visualization

You can also browse a text-only version of this application at gopher://origin.rxivist.org from a Gopher-enabled² browser such as Lynx or an HTTP proxy like the one hosted by Floodgap Systems.

Coverage of Rxivist

Data notes

"All-time" Twitter metrics (from Crossref) currently date back to February 2017. This is pulled from a different source than Altmetric, so their totals will likely be different.
Download metrics are updated for each paper about once every two weeks, which means there may be a discrepency between the totals reported by the preprint servers and the totals reported here.

For an overview of the common questions raised regarding preprints, see this Q&A from preprint advocate Ronald D. Vale.
The Gopher protocol was a precursor to HTTP and the World Wide Web, developed at UMN in the early 1990s.

PanLingua

Multi-lingual preprint search

News

27 Nov 2020: The website and API now include results pulled from medRxiv as well as bioRxiv.
18 Dec 2019: We're pleased to announce PanLingua, a new tool that enables you to search for machine-translated bioRxiv preprints using more than 100 different languages.
21 May 2019: PLOS Biology has published a community page about Rxivist.org and its design.
10 May 2019: The paper analyzing the Rxivist dataset has been published at eLife.
1 Mar 2019: We now have summary statistics about bioRxiv downloads and submissions.
8 Feb 2019: Data from Altmetric is now available on the Rxivist details page for every preprint. Look for the "donut" under the download metrics.
30 Jan 2019: preLights has featured the Rxivist preprint and written about our findings.
22 Jan 2019: Nature just published an article about Rxivist and our data.
13 Jan 2019: The Rxivist preprint is live!