Rxivist combines preprints from bioRxiv with data from Twitter to help you find the papers being discussed in your field. Currently indexing 42,904 bioRxiv papers from 193,370 authors.
About
Rxivist indexes and sorts metadata from bioRxiv, a preprint server1 operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. There is no official association between bioRxiv and this project. A preprint about Rxivist is now available on bioRxiv.
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 was developed in 2018 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
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 liekly be different.
- BioRxiv download metrics are updated for each paper about once every two weeks, which means there may be a discrepency between the totals reported on bioRxiv 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.
News
- 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!