Recognizes The 1% After Blind Evaluation of 57,455 Scientific Preprints
TEL AVIV, Israel, June 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- QED Science, a science validity engine and modern infrastructure for researchers, funders, institutions and life science organizations today launched The 1%, the top 574 life science preprints. The company anonymously scored 57,455 bioRxiv preprints submitted between May 2025 and April 2026 for originality and validity.
The ranking is powered by QED Score, QED Science's validated metric for measuring scientific quality at scale. QED Science anonymously evaluated each preprint for originality and scientific validity, independent of author identity, institutional affiliation, journal placement, citation count, or reputation-based signals. Originality and validity is judged based on a multi-factor analysis that focuses on the manuscript's extracted claims and evidence rather than its writing style.
Scientific discovery is accelerating, but scientific advancement is not keeping pace due to the systems used to evaluate it. There can often be up to a 24 month lag between submission and publication of a scientific paper. Traditional proxies for trust were built for a different era of science and unavailable at the preprint stage - journal rank, citation count, institutional affiliation, and author reputation.
Preprints are increasingly where new discoveries first appear. They may contain early signals for the next important cancer treatment, vaccine, biological mechanism, or research tool. But because preprints have not yet passed through journal peer review, researchers, funders, and institutions need better ways to evaluate them quickly, rigorously and fairly.
QED Science addresses this challenge. The platform is already used by more than 10,000 laboratories across 1,500 institutions in over 70 countries, helping scientific teams evaluate more of the research record earlier in the discovery cycle.
Oded Rechavi, co-founder and lead scientist at QED Science said, "To truly advance, we have to judge scientific quality by the work itself, not by the institution, journal or reputation behind it. By removing identifying information and evaluating manuscripts blindly, we can build a stronger foundation for the scientific corpus."
Key insights from QED Science's research and release of The 1% include:
- QED Science evaluated 57,455 preprints, a process estimated to require hundreds of thousands of hours of expert time.
- Domain experts agreed with the QED Score over journal rank in 75% of decisive cases, when the QED Score and journal rank disagreed.
- Journal rank is a less reliable proxy for paper quality because QED Science found that 12.9% of high-scoring papers ended up in lower-ranked journals.
- Several smaller funders produced a higher share of exceptional science than the larger and more well-recognized funders, for example the G. Harold & Leila Y. Mathers Foundation placed 9 of 32 supported papers in the top 1%, which is a 28.1% rate, while the National Institutes of Health is 2.0%.
Niv Mastboim, CEO of QED Science, said, "Science has matured past the systems that were built centuries ago to evaluate it, so we created QED Science to fundamentally evolve how science is created and shared. The 1% based on the QED Score validates preprints so that science can make an impact sooner."
To learn more about QED Science and The 1% visit www.qedscience.com.
About QED Science
QED Science is an AI company on a mission to surface the best science, and celebrate the scientists behind the manuscripts.
Built on the belief that scientific quality should speak for itself, QED Science has developed QED Score, a validated quality metric that evaluates life science manuscripts on originality and validity after full anonymization, removing the influence of author reputation, institutional prestige, and publication venue.
In use by more than 10,000 laboratories across 1,500 institutions in over 70 countries, QED Score delivers assessments in minutes that typically take months.
Beyond discovery, QED's validity engine empowers researchers to understand which claims hold up across papers, grants, and their day-to-day scientific work, without training on proprietary data. The 1%, QED Science's selection of the most exceptional life science preprints, is the largest blind quality assessment of preprint science conducted to date.
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Lacy Talton
Evergreen & Oak on behalf of QED Science
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