if it’s the latter, where do you look for the appropriate response from their peers? If the former, how do professionals get access to pre-published works to critique them?
In: Mathematics
This varies a lot by field and has even changed substantially in the last few years in a few fields.
In traditional peer review, articles are kept private until they are accepted by a journal. Authors submit articles to the journal which sends them out to an anonymous set of peer reviewers who are also supposed to keep them private. If the peer reviewers approve of the research, the journal accepts and publishes it.
In many fields, however, authors do not wait for publication to share their work. They may distribute it as a “preprint” or “working paper” either just within their field or to the whole internet with a press release and everything. They (typically) still seek publication at academic journals.
This looser approach to academic publication has pros and cons. Traditional peer review can significantly slow down the growth and dissemination of knowledge, and unscrupulous participants can use it as an opportunity to silence researchers they dislike or even steal their ideas. On the other hand, wide dissemination of academic work before peer review can lead to confusion (especially if the authors change the paper between initial working papers and the final published version) and sometimes allows the release and wide adoption of work that peer reviewers ultimately find to be legitimately flawed.
A good example is the big shift in epidemiological studies during COVID-19, which were routinely released as preprints rather than waiting for publication. This allowed crucial research to be distributed to policymakers while it was still relevant, but it also contributed to significant confusion when papers disagreed and made it difficult to differentiate serious work from studies with major flaws.
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