Frequently Asked Questions

Research Square is a new pre-publication platform that allows you to share your work early, gain feedback on your manuscript, and discover emerging science all in one place.

Posting your work early allows you to register your discovery prior to publication in a journal. A DOI timestamps your work and you can start earning citations. Once public, your work can be cited, commented on, and shared by you or others.

Most importantly, posting early means discoveries are shared more quickly, allowing others to build off your work and science to move more quickly. A commentary on the benefits of preprints in the life sciences can be found here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6288/899.

Research Square features all the characteristics of a traditional preprint server, but with some notable differences:

1. All preprints are displayed in HTML. The full text is indexed and machine-readable so that it is more discoverable by search engines.
2. Manuscripts can receive editorial ‘badges' to demonstrate they meet high standards in Integrity, Reproducibility, and Statistical Rigor.
3. Readers can comment on a paper using our custom-built commenting system or the hypothes.is annotation tool.
4. Figures are rendered using a lightbox that allows for zooming and downloading.

Click the Submit button, create an account, and then follow the instructions to upload your manuscript and figures. After you submit your paper to Research Square, it will be checked by our editorial staff to ensure it meets our standards for online posting. We'll email you when your paper is posted online and ready to be shared. At that time, you'll receive a DOI and a link to the public version of your article to share with others.

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a persistent record that your work has been published online and is part of the scholarly record. This means the work can be cited by other researchers in the knowledge that the cited article will be permanently available through the DOI link.

DOIs from Research Square are issued through Crossref, who have a specific DOI structure for preprints. This allows them to be linked to the final published journal article.

We currently accept the following article types:

1. Research Article - a full article of the kind that appears in academic journals. Research Articles usually take the form of Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions; however, we accept other formats as well.
2. Systematic Review - a formal evaluation of the literature on a particular topic, including clearly defined inclusion/exclusion criteria, an exclusion flowchart and a meta-analysis of available results.
3. Method Article - a full description of a new method. A Method Article should include a write-up of the steps taken to validate the method, with results to support this validation.
4. Short Report - a brief write up of a single experiment. This often takes the form of a single figure with brief accompanying text to explain how the figure was obtained.
5. Case Report - a write-up of an individual clinical presentation. This is usually accompanied by a literature review to place in the context of current clinical understanding.
6. Data Note - a single dataset accompanied by a brief write up of how the data were obtained.

We do not accept literature reviews, hypotheses, opinions, theories or commentaries.

No. Research Square is a preprint server and is therefore not listed in the Web of Science. As such, it does not receive an Impact Factor. Articles can still be cited, however, and citations will be counted by Google Scholar and Crossref.

Whichever reference style you use, the citation should make clear that the paper is a preprint and not yet part of the published literature. We suggest the following format:

AUTHOR. TITLE. DATE, PREPRINT (Version #) available at Research Square DOI.

Example:

Meybohm, P., Lindau, S., Treskatsch, S. et al. Liberal transfusion strategy to prevent mortality and anaemia-associated, ischaemic events in elderly non-cardiac surgical patients – the study design of the LIBERAL-Trial. 20 December 2018, PREPRINT (Version 2) available at Research Square https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.2.55/v2

To upload a revision, simply log into your account and select 'Edit Submission.'

When an article is submitted, it undergoes a series of checks to ensure it is suitable to be included on the platform. These checks include:

1. Is it in scope? Does it fit with one of the article types listed above?
2. Does it represent the findings of a scientific study?
3. Is it in English and is the language of sufficient quality?
4. Does it contain any findings that may pose a risk to health?
5. Does it contain any claims that require peer review before being made public?

If we feel your paper does not pass all of these checks, we may decide not to post it, in which case you will receive an email informing you of our decision. Decisions to withhold posting cannot be appealed.

When you post to a preprint server you retain full copyright over your article and are free to post it in as many places as you like. However, having more than one version in different places could reduce the usage counts and metrics obtained here and on other sites.

Once your paper is posted online, use the share icons in your author dashboard to share on social media or through email. You can reply to comments and engage with the community directly. You can also flag comments you find inappropriate.

More and more journals are open to preprints; however, journal policies differ. Prior to submitting your manuscript to a journal, we recommend you review the author guidelines to determine the journal's policy on accepting preprints. A list of academic journals by preprint policy can be found on Wikipedia.

If your paper is rejected, all information corresponding to the journal will be removed, leaving only the article and any revisions that have been submitted. You are free to send the link to your article to other journals as part of a future submission.

It's free!

In Review is a pre-publication service offered to authors when they submit to participating journals. Powered by Research Square, In Review gives authors access to up-to-date information on their article while it's still under review.

For more information about In Review including participating journals, see here.