I have used this blog to complain about peer reviewers (and to be fair, I also complain about authors and editors) but right now I feel like it is a good time to acknowledge the critical value of the peer review system. There are many points of potential challenge associated with translating, or maybe it is better described as transforming, research activities into an accurate and comprehensible text-based record. I don't know about everyone else but anything I write is likely to be incorrect, awkward, or maybe more generously described as less than ideal as a first draft. If you could see me typing now, you would see it consists largely of stopping, restarting, deleting and inserting words, punctuation, and spaces, pausing to consider and re-read, followed by more writing and more undoing (and redoing) previously deleted content. I catch some things but almost always rely on one or two pre-readers before I submit anything for publication. Still, within peer reviewer comments there are almost always questions or recommendations about structure or grammar, which should be the easy stuff to get right before you submit and still I don't always. But I believe the primary value in peer review is its role to consider and comment on quality of research conduct and associated credibility of results. So it follows that I personally am getting pretty tired of seeing research from pre-prints featured in popular media reports, columns and other types of articles. I am not even certain that most people not working in a research or academic research setting even know what a pre-print is, whether or not the work is clearly described as "not yet peer reviewed" or "not yet through the peer review system." I've also gotten a sense of anti-intellectualism and cynicism about research, researchers, and research institutions - and some of this cynicism is warranted because there is a fair amount of not great research done - so I am not certain the extent to which people value and/or trust peer review. But well done peer review should limit (hopefully prevent) fabrication, exaggeration, and some scholars' tendency to make claims beyond what their research design was capable of finding.
The emphasis on pre-prints - which are manuscripts produced by researchers but not yet subjected to the important quality check associated with peer review - seemed to increase in popular media when the COVID-19 pandemic was new. I suspect this was because there was a perception of mass consumer/reader interest in any new information and the process of peer review takes time so delays availability of research reports. There was also probably a dearth of content due to many restricted activities. So online popular media had the appetite for content and researchers always want to promote their work. A pre-print manuscript, in contrast to something that will be reviewed and published,, can be put online on one of the pre-print websites as soon as it is written. Some academic publishers have companion pre-print websites, and will link to the published article when (if) it becomes available. I published a pre-print once and the only criterion was that it had to be a report about research. (And I have no particular issue with pre-prints in general. I published mine because I had to have a retrievable hyperlink and the paper was still undergoing review. I would not hesitate to publish/upload a pre-print again in the future if it made sense to do so.) While I can (sort of) understand use of pre-prints as the basis for popular media reports back in April of 2020 when people probably were desperate for any insight to help them make sense of the pandemic, I think this is a practice that needs to stop for the most part. Frankly lots of popular media articles even written about published research are so dumbed down as to not really be helpful. Or accurate. Writing about not yet reviewed research just increases the odds that inaccurate information is going to widely disseminated, trusted and even inspire (unsupported) behavior changes. Visual created by me in MS Word for Mac v. 16.65. Some of these are made up phrases and some come from somewhere else but I think a partial excerpt, crossed thru, posted on my rarely accessed, academically oriented blog, falls within the fair use guidelines. Dickens (not crossed thru and highlighted line from "A Tale of Two Cities") is in public domain.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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