Relationships between preprints and journal articles link different versions of research outputs and allow one to follow the evolution of a publication over time. Some of those relationships are provided by Crossref members (including publishers, universities, research groups, funders, etc.) when they deposit metadata with Crossref, but a significant number of them are missing.

To fill this gap, Crossref developed a new automated strategy for discovering relationships between preprints and journal articles and applied it to all the preprints in the Crossref database. It was made the resulting dataset, containing both publisher-asserted and automatically discovered relationships, publicly available for anyone to analyse.

The Crossref deposit schema allows Crossref members to provide these relationships for new publications, either as a has-preprint relationship deposited with a journal article, or an is-preprint-of relationship deposited with a preprint. Overall, based on the number of existing and newly discovered preprint–journal article relationships, it seems that employing automated matching strategies would approximately double the number of these relationships in the Crossref database. In the future, we would like to match new journal articles on an ongoing basis.

Source: https://www.crossref.org/blog/discovering-relationships-between-preprints-and-journal-articles/