Finding preprints discussed in news stories

I spied with my self isolating eye this story in the Observer (the Sunday edition of the Guardian).

I decided to try to track down the preprints.   I have to say that tracking down published articles from details in a newspaper article has never, in my experience, been easy, but here goes.

There are six:

One from the Molecular Virology Research Group, University of Liverpool involving mice and with James Stewart as a possible author.

One from the (Johan) Neyts lab at the University of Leuven, involving Syrian Hamsters.

One submitted to Nature from the US, involving weight loss in mice.

One from the University of Glasgow's Centre for Virus Research, about how Omicron enters the body.

One from the University of Hong Kong, reporting less infection in the lungs.

And one from Prof Ravi Gupta, University of Cambridge, involving blood samples from vaccinated patients.

What about Googling it?   I come back to that.   But first, I have a link from the Omicron post on this blog to COVID related preprints in medRxiv and bioRxiv.  This shows you a list by date submitted, and now lists 21000 preprints, so is less useful to locate specific things.   The Observer do report that four of the six preprints have been published (their word) since Christmas Eve, but even so to find them in this chronological list (looking at the number submitted just on 1st January) may be rather tricky.

Using medRxiv's advanced search and selecting bioRxiv and medRxiv and searching for Stewart as an author easily finds the Liverpool preprint.  It is also on the publications page of the research group, that page found via Google (more about Google later as well!).

The same medRxiv method finds Neyts.    

Gupta is there too but was submitted on 17th December, so takes some finding.   This tweet from Eric Topol, retweeted by James Stewart, lists a link, and also links to Stewart, Neyts and the Hong Kong preprint.   The Hong Kong link is to a news page on the University of Hong Kong site.  I don't think I can find the preprint in medRxiv or bioRxiv - the news release talks of it being "currently under peer review for publication".

What happens if you do go to Google first?

stewart liverpool sars-cov-2 mice finds it (third result today).

university of hong kong omicron lung infection finds the news item referred to by Eric Topol (see above) and an item on CIDRAP.  The wording suggests they have read the press release.  It doesn't seem to find the preprint itself.

university of glasgow centre for virus research omicron mice finds the Observer article but also a press release from Glasgow, with a link to the preprint on their servers.

neyts leuven sars-cov-2 syrian hamsters finds it in bioRxiv - first result.

nature covid omicron weight loss finds this which is about a paper in Nature but the page does not mention the words weight loss.   

Finally, ravi gupta sars-cov-2 vaccine, finds this, which I think may be it, and has a link to the paper in bioRxiv.

So there we are.