How many preprints have actually been printed and why: a case study of
  computer science preprints on arXiv
Jialiang Lin Yao Yu Yu Zhou Zhiyang Zhou Xiaodong Shi
Preprints play an increasingly critical role in academic communities. There
are many reasons driving researchers to post their manuscripts to preprint
servers before formal submission to journals or conferences, but the use of
preprints has also sparked considerable controversy, especially surrounding the
claim of priority. In this paper, a case study of computer science preprints
submitted to arXiv from 2008 to 2017 is conducted to quantify how many
preprints have eventually been printed in peer-reviewed venues. Among those
published manuscripts, some are published under different titles and without an
update to their preprints on arXiv. In the case of these manuscripts, the
traditional fuzzy matching method is incapable of mapping the preprint to the
final published version. In view of this issue, we introduce a semantics-based
mapping method with the employment of Bidirectional Encoder Representations
from Transformers (BERT). With this new mapping method and a plurality of data
sources, we find that 66% of all sampled preprints are published under
unchanged titles and 11% are published under different titles and with other
modifications. A further analysis was then performed to investigate why these
preprints but not others were accepted for publication. Our comparison reveals
that in the field of computer science, published preprints feature adequate
revisions, multiple authorship, detailed abstract and introduction, extensive
and authoritative references and available source code.