What's with all this pre-print business. It became very prevalent during covid, where it felt like every week some new pre-print was published that discusses some new aspect of the virus. These papers would then be used in arguments and put forward as proof of whatever claim the arguer was making.

Every man and his dog can publish a pre-print and in my opinion it's academically worthless.

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ACCount39 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Preprints are just a way to sacrifice rigor for accessibility and velocity. You can throw out "here, this is what I'm working on, here are the quick and dirty findings" really fast and with little friction.

This does skip the academic "checks and balances" like journal selection and peer review - but it can also help anyone else who's working on the adjacent topics.

If a field is moving fast, and you think there can be some value in your work for others in the near term? Preprint. If your work is too incomplete or too minor to warrant trying to polish and publish it, but you don't want to table it? Preprint. Too deep in corporate structures to care about academic "street cred", and want your work to be accessible? Preprint. Have an exciting early finding that you want to push out there, and are willing to take the rep risks of being wrong about it? Preprint.

There's a reason why preprints came to be the lifeblood of ML.

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VBprogrammer an hour ago | parent [-]

Academia isn't my thing but I also wonder if there isn't an aspect of putting a stake in the ground? So that if someone beats you to publishing you at least have some record of being on that track.

	▲	gmueckl 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That is definitely a big motivator for publishing preprints. Journal submissions can take up to a year. Comference submissions take months. If the field is moving fast, claiming a finding early can become an important career move. In older days, academics would just share notes on their work and word wouldn't usually spread widely before publication. Preprints may be the better model. But public visibility means that non-experts now get to see the good and the bad research equally, but they won't have the domain knowledge and skill to distinguish one from the other with confidence.

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sandeepkd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have a similar to pagerank method I use to evaluate such papers. I look for the references to see how many authors are using their own references (past work), the idea being that people do not jump too far, they make incremental progress.

For the pre-print I could only find only one author who has a single referenced article.

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bpodgursky an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The review time on top journals is multiple years now (your paper will go through many review loops each of which takes months). It's just totally unworkable for active research, whether you're a student or a corporation.

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howunfortunate 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Journal articles are usually behind a paywall. Preprints are a fully open workaround allowed by most journals.

> Every man and his dog can publish a pre-print and in my opinion it's academically worthless.

Sure but if you look at the authors names and see they have 50 other published papers, you can get a rough idea that it's probably equivalently good to their other work.

Until you've done it yourself, it's hard to grok just how bad the peer review process is. It's like...5% better than nothing.

Honestly you could argue peer review is worse than nothing, as it also filters out actually quality work that violates some dogma of the field.