Wikipedia is the fifth most visited site in the world and the most popular reference work in history. And while its policy of allowing anyone to edit democratises knowledge, it also puts the site at risk of systemic bias.
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The news is awash with discussions about the effectiveness and reported side effects of specific vaccines, and ongoing patterns of infections, hospitalisations and fatalities. We routinely use numbers from catching a train to buying a house, and read news reports on elections and polls, currency conversion rates and shares, sports scores and weather forecasts. Numbers are needed for all research, because all researchers have to read and judge the trustworthiness of the research of others, including research that involves numbers.
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October is ‘Halloween season’ ― a fun cultural holiday for many people worldwide. It represents a socially sanctioned time of year when children and adults alike can escape to a realm of fantasy and mystery that involves the simultaneous expression of the ‘lighter’ and ‘darker’ sides of human nature. In addition to carving pumpkins, dressing in costume, and the nightly ritual of trick-or-treating, a favorite activity this month for many people is the psychosocial phenomenon known as ‘paranormal tourism.’
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Preprints can represent a number of points on the timeline of scholarly communications, be it posted before submission to a journal or archived after a paper is already published, or even as an end goal itself. In the simpler times before COVID-19, an author may have decided to post a paper to a preprint server in order to get credit for research or get comments from other researchers before ultimately submitting to a journal. They then would have submitted their research to a journal and waited several months for their paper to go through peer review.
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