Is there any measurable benefit in publishing preprints in the arXiv section Quantitative Biology?
A public preprint server such as arXiv allows authors to publish their manuscripts before submitting them to journals for peer review. It offers the chance to establish priority by making the results available upon completion. This article presents the arXiv section Quantitative Biology and investigates the advantages of preprint publications in terms of reception, which can be measured by means of citations. This paper focuses on the publication and citation delay, citation counts and the authors publishing their e-prints on arXiv. Moreover, the paper discusses the benefit for scientists as well as publishers. The results that are based on 12 selected journals show that submitting preprints to arXiv has become more common in the past few years, but the number of papers submitted to Quantitative Biology is still small and represents only a fraction of the total research output in biology. An immense advantage of arXiv is to overcome the long publication delay resulting from peer review. Although preprints are visible prior to the officially published articles, a significant citation advantage was only found for the Journal of Theoretical Biology.