4 Reasons You Should Engage with Preprints

New preprint servers are popping up in droves in the academic community, allowing authors to share their research, track their downloads and citations with a unique DOI, and get community feedback all before their work is peer reviewed. Preprints, which are hosted on servers such as Advance: A SAGE preprints community, are scholarly papers that have not gone through peer review. Preprint servers allow authors, as PLOS puts it, “to share their work early, openly, and in a way that is free from journal influence or stylistic preferences.”

There are many benefits to posting your own paper to a preprint server, but why should you engage with other preprints in your field, or maybe even ones outside of your expertise?

SAGE’s Advance hosts a large variety of preprints in social science fields. From education to sports to tourism research, there are many subjects to browse and share your valuable insights on. Here are 3 reasons why you should engage with a preprint today:

1)      It’s easy to find research in your fields of interest. For example, each paper on Advance is tagged with relevant subject categories, so it is not difficult to find similar papers. On the homepage, just click Categories and peruse the large variety of subjects available.

2)      You rely on your own expertise just as much as you rely on your colleagues’. Your research is built off pieces from those that came before you. “The purpose of publishing original research studies is to disseminate the results of experiments to inform the audience…about advances in a…field.” Fostering a community of engagement with others leads to “Aha!” moments and diffusion of important and defining research.

3)      You’ll learn something new. Venturing into the vast array of categories will lead you to exciting early research, which may then make you rethink an aspect of your own work. “The process of researching, writing, and revising papers increases authors’ insight in their chosen field of research.”

4)      You can help shape someone else’s paper. Many authors post preprints before they submit to a peer reviewed publication, and by leaving a comment, asking a question, or providing constructive feedback you can help improve other authors’ work.

Discover new research and submit your own social science papers to Advance today!

Thank you to the authors who have submitted to our server and those who have taken the time to engage with other preprints. We appreciate your support of preprints and early research. Keep an eye on this blog for more updates and upcoming news from Advance!