bioRxiv Neuroscience: 2026 Category Growth

bioRxiv neuroscience preprints total 90,327 as of 4 July 2026 — nearly one in five of every preprint posted across the server’s 27 subject categories — making neuroscience bioRxiv’s largest single collection by a wide margin, even though other categories, notably microbiology, have shown faster year-on-year posting growth in recent cycles.

bioRxiv is the nonprofit preprint server for the life sciences, launched by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2013 and operated since 2023 by openRxiv, on which researchers post manuscripts before formal peer review.

• What bioRxiv’s neuroscience collection looks like today
• How neuroscience compares with other bioRxiv subject categories
• Why microbiology is bioRxiv’s fastest-moving category
• What subject-category growth signals for fast-moving fields
• Common questions about bioRxiv and preprint posting

What does bioRxiv’s neuroscience volume actually show?

Neuroscience is bioRxiv’s largest subject category, with 90,327 preprints posted as of 4 July 2026 — more than double the cumulative total of any other single collection on the platform. The category has held this position since bioRxiv’s earliest years, a pattern first documented at scale in Abdill and Blekhman’s 2019 eLife bibliometric study of the server’s posting behaviour. Volume alone does not equal growth rate, however: a large, mature category can still expand more slowly than a smaller one that is compounding faster year over year.

That distinction matters for anyone using preprint volume as a proxy for research activity. Neuroscience’s scale reflects thirteen years of accumulated posting by a field that adopted bioRxiv early and consistently. It does not, on its own, tell you where posting behaviour is accelerating right now — which is the more useful signal for spotting where fast-moving fields are choosing to share results ahead of peer review.

How does neuroscience compare with bioRxiv’s other subject categories?

Across bioRxiv’s 27 subject collections, neuroscience accounts for roughly 19% of all preprints ever posted. Bioinformatics and microbiology are the next-largest categories, each holding a mid-single-digit share, and together they still post fewer cumulative preprints than neuroscience alone. The table below is drawn directly from bioRxiv’s own collection pages, live-counted on 4 July 2026.

This cumulative view understates recent momentum in smaller categories. bioRxiv’s public Details API (api.biorxiv.org), which reports year-by-year submission counts, shows several categories — including cell biology, immunology and bioengineering — posting double-digit percentage growth between 2022 and 2023, a period in which neuroscience’s own annual volume was essentially flat. In other words: neuroscience leads on stock, but not always on flow.

Why is microbiology bioRxiv’s fastest-moving category?

Microbiology’s rise is closely tied to a single external shock: the COVID-19 pandemic. From early 2020, a large share of SARS-CoV-2 research was routed through bioRxiv’s microbiology collection, producing a documented surge in posting volume that outpaced almost every other category on the server. That episode was tracked in detail by Fraser et al.’s 2021 PLOS Biology study of preprint use during the pandemic, which found preprint servers — bioRxiv and medRxiv chief among them — became a primary early-dissemination channel for COVID-19 research.

The pandemic-era spike has since normalised, but microbiology has not reverted to its pre-2020 posting rate. Several structural drivers appear to be sustaining elevated volume:

• Continued growth in metagenomics and microbiome research, which increasingly relies on large sequencing datasets suited to rapid preprint dissemination.
• Rising antimicrobial-resistance research, an area funders have prioritised for open, fast-turnaround dissemination.
• Genomic epidemiology methods developed during the pandemic that have since been applied to routine pathogen surveillance work.

The result is a category that, despite starting well behind neuroscience in absolute terms, has closed to within a few thousand preprints of bioinformatics — bioRxiv’s second-largest collection — inside little more than a decade.

What does subject-category growth signal for fast-moving fields?

Subject-category posting trends are a useful, underused proxy for where a field’s culture of early sharing is strengthening. A category climbing in year-on-year volume — even from a small base — indicates that researchers in that field increasingly prefer to establish priority and gather feedback before formal peer review, rather than wait months or years for journal publication.

For research administration teams, this matters in three practical ways. First, category-level posting trends can flag emerging fields before they show up in citation-based bibliometrics, which lag by design. Second, institutions benchmarking output across departments should treat preprint posting rate as a leading indicator, not a substitute for peer-reviewed publication counts. Third, publishers and funders monitoring open-science uptake can use category share shifts to anticipate where submission pipelines are likely to grow fastest next.

None of this displaces the version-of-record. bioRxiv preprints receive a DOI and become part of the citable scientific record, but the platform’s own FAQ is explicit that they are “not certified by scientific peer review, edited, or typeset before being posted online.” Category-growth data is a signal about researcher behaviour, not a measure of research quality.

Common questions about bioRxiv and preprint posting

What is bioRxiv used for?

bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service that lets life-sciences researchers post manuscripts publicly before, or independent of, formal journal peer review. It is used to establish priority, gather early community feedback, and speed up the dissemination of findings across all life-science subject areas, including neuroscience.

Who operates bioRxiv?

bioRxiv was founded by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2013. It has been operated since 2023 by openRxiv, a nonprofit organisation spun out specifically to run both bioRxiv and its clinical-sciences counterpart, medRxiv, as the two platforms’ combined volume outgrew a single-institution model.

Are bioRxiv preprints peer-reviewed?

No. bioRxiv’s own FAQ states that submitted manuscripts are not certified by scientific peer review, edited, or typeset before posting, meaning they may contain errors or omissions. Readers should treat preprints as preliminary findings pending formal review, not as validated, published results.

Is it acceptable to cite bioRxiv preprints?

Yes. Manuscripts posted on bioRxiv receive a DOI and are considered part of the citable scientific record. Many journals and funders now explicitly permit preprint citation, though authors should note a preprint’s unreviewed status when referencing it in formal scholarly work.

Neuroscience is likely to remain bioRxiv’s largest subject category for the foreseeable future simply on the strength of accumulated volume. But the categories worth watching are the faster-moving ones: if microbiology, immunology, and cell biology keep compounding at their recent pace, the platform’s category rankings by growth rate — as distinct from by size — will look markedly different by the end of the decade. For institutions and publishers tracking where open dissemination is gaining ground fastest, that growth-rate view, not the raw cumulative total, is the more forward-looking metric to follow.