
Preprints could promote confusion and distortion - vikramkr
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05789-4
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vikramkr
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I've noticed a lot of preprints seem
to be getting shared and promoted, and the interest in bio/med research has
naturally spiked. I think it's good to have a reminder that preprints are not
peer reviewed, and that you should be very careful as to what conclusions you
draw from preprint publications, especially in ones outside of your area of
expertise. Peer review isn't perfect, but there have been some recent threads
on HN and news stories based on preprints with glaring issues that would have
been caught in peer review. Furthermore, even peer review not being perfect
should give you a reason to pause and reconsider how much weight you want to
give individual articles, especially ones that haven't even gone through that
most basic filter of being read over by a scientist or two before being
plopped into a megajournal somewhere. There's a lot of incentive for people to
publish big, eye catching conclusions, especially right now, so it's a good
idea to both be cautious of anything you read in a preprint and pause for a
second before sharing a preprint with a stunning finding.

Also, - could it make sense for HN to have preprint submissions have a tag
like [PREPRINT] in the title? So people scrolling through and just reading
titles would have a quick indication of what headlines are based on preprints?
It could be helpful in providing the context necessary to interpret links
shared to HN and to fighting the spread of misinformation or bad science.

~~~
elisharobinson
i dont think peer review is as valid as people make it out to be. regulation
should be introduced to have more rigorous reproduce-ability and government
funding for research should have quotas meant specially for reproducing
findings independently. peer review alone is no longer a valid method of
getting consensus about science. the retractions from new england journal of
medicine should give a good indication of how rotten academia has gotten.

~~~
vikramkr
It's not perfect. Preprints are even less perfect. Just having a big finding
based off of a single peer reviewed article is also a very bad idea. You
really can't get much certainty until you've got dozens of papers and meta-
analysis finding consistent threads, but people don't seem inclined to wait
for that before reporting unfortunately

