Three great examples of why preprints are beneficial to research

BY MELINDA KERAMAT

Advance: a SAGE preprints community celebrated its one year anniversary on August 31st. Since its launch, Advance has accumulated over 300 preprints, featuring research all across the humanities and social sciences. Preprints, as you may know, are early versions of a scholarly paper that haven’t been peer-reviewed. In honor of this special occasion, we would like to highlight three papers of interest that have been posted on SAGE’s own preprint server.

The first paper we would like to draw attention to focuses on a relevant and fascinating topic: “Escape Rooms in Education” by Charlene Murphree and Dr. Sherry Vafa. The authors’ goal was to determine whether Breakout EDU, a new collaborative learning game utilized in classrooms, is a beneficial platform for student learning. When asked why she and her co-author submitted a preprint, Ms. Murphree replied, “We opted for a preprint prior to submitting [to] a journal in hopes of advancing our opportunities of publication. We felt like if the preprint was approved we were one step closer to publication.” Furthermore, she noted, “While our paper was not accepted by the journal, the process was a great experience to get further possible edits and change needed.” Indeed, it’s no secret that one of the benefits of preprints is the opportunity to receive helpful feedback on your work. Advance offers a comment section, so we encourage you to provide feedback to the authors using this feature.

The next preprint we would like to highlight is titled “Examining Consumer-Brand Relationships in the UK Energy Sector A Social Media Perspective”. This preprint was submitted by Emmanuel Mogaji, Dandison Ukpabi, and Sunday Olaleye, and is one of Advance’s most-downloaded preprints. The authors examined comments on social media to better understand the consumer-brand relationship within the UK’s energy sector. Dr. Mogaji explained why he often chooses to submit preprints before selecting a journal to submit to: “Firstly, you don't have to wait for long period of peer review, [and] secondly, you don't wait for the formatting stage while your article has been accepted. If I have an idea, I can quickly share it and start the discussion.” Besides fast dissemination and early feedback, other advantages Dr. Mogaji noted were “easy access to [one’s] work”, “tracking the progress and reception of your work”, along with receiving a DOI and shareable links.

The last preprint we wanted to showcase is “Psychometric Evaluation of the Mating Intelligence Scale in Iran”, authored by Samaneh Najarpourian and S. Abdolvahab Samavi. The authors explored the psychometric properties of the Mating Intelligence Scale utilized in Iran. The study’s findings suggest the scale is appropriate for measuring mating intelligence. If you are interested in reading the peer-reviewed, final version of this paper, you can access the published version, recently published in SAGE Open, a SAGE-owned open access journal. This paper demonstrates the symbiotic relationship that preprints can have with peer-reviewed journals.

In addition to congratulating the authors highlighted in this post, the Advance team would like to extend a big thank you to all of our authors who have submitted in the last year. We appreciate your support of preprints and, as we enter our second year, we look forward to continuing to highlight the interesting early research being submitted to Advance. So stay tuned for more updates and exciting news from Advance!

Interested in getting involved in Advance: a SAGE preprints community? We are looking for volunteers from the academic research community to help shape Advance’s vision. If you’re interested, please fill out this form. If you have any questions or comments you’d like to share, contact us at advance@sagepub.com.

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