A paper’s journey
The journey from planning and organizing to conducting the study, then analyzing the data and writing up the manuscript is a long and tedious process.
The ultimate crown and stamp of approval comes in the form of a final publication in a peer-reviewed journal. But what many don’t realize is that the road to glory isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Specifically, that the peer-review process, which many hold dear as somewhat of a safeguard between bad and good science, is also not without its flaws.
Within most fields, peer-reviewed journals operate and are dependent on experts within the field as their reviewers, who volunteer and provide their free time to critically assess and review the articles being submitted. That takes a considerable amount of time if done properly, as a paper that is done well will mean at least having a few rounds of revisions moving forward, which requires additional time.
But that’s also the issue. There’s probably never been more research done than today, and journals are overburdened with submissions. They, unfortunately, often struggle to find adequate reviewers who can take on the submissions and review the articles.
In many cases, I’ve noticed in the last few years that peer review has somewhat dropped in quality. The rise in popularity of predatory-like publishers has also slowly increased the number of published papers (i.e., quantity), but what about quality?
Basically, journals invite experts within the field (I hope, at least) to review articles. For example, I’ve been approached on numerous different occasions to review papers pertaining to blood flow restriction training. Even though I’m informed enough to understand the basic physiology and the underlying concepts behind BFR training, and can pick up on a lot of things pertaining to the methods or stats, I virtually have no good recollection of recent literature or in-depth knowledge on the topic to even think for a second that me being a reviewer for such an article is a good idea.
Why? Because I could potentially make a mistake and miss something that’s pretty important (e.g. the protocol, cuffs, pressure standardization), that won’t get flagged but could be meaningful enough not to be a good representation of the rest of the literature. I’m obviously exaggerating a bit, but it could happen.
There’s also a point to be made that the process from submission for peer review to the stage of acceptance and ultimately publication can, in some cases, take months. It’s not uncommon for the whole peer-review process to take longer than a year.
Timeline problems
For example, look at the most recent meta-regressions on proximity to failure and training volume. The former was first preprinted in May 2023, while the latter was first preprinted in October 2024. Both eventually got accepted and published in one of the top journals in our field (Sports Medicine). However, the proximity to failure paper was published in July 2024, and the volume paper in December 2025. Both were published more than a full year after first being preprinted.
This goes back to my earlier point that getting reviewers to actually do the peer review and follow through with the revision process takes a while.
But one way to overcome delays in disseminating research is through the use of preprints.
What is a preprint?
“A version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The immediate distribution of preprints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission.”
I’ve noticed some have been extremely critical of the use of preprints to disseminate research and communicate it on social media. Some have discussed them as negative and intended to be used for clickbait and “speeding up the process” of just getting your work public without undergoing the peer-review process. But if you return to the initial slides, there’s an inherent assumption and view of the peer-review process as a whole that underlies it (i.e., the holy grail of academia).
Although most major publishers permit preprints, a minority of journals still restrict submissions that have previously been posted on a preprint server.
While some tend to look at preprints as a bad thing and an opportunity to use flashy, clickbaity titles on social media, can’t we say the same could happen once the published version of the article is out? So, if the incentive is the same – it’s more so a matter of before it’ll get communicated that way. With a preprint, they may have perhaps done it earlier. And this is me NOT suggesting anyone actually has such incentives because, c’mon, it’s actually researchers and academics themselves communicating the papers they’re excited to share after months of work and get feedback on.
Do preprints change much? A new preprint (the irony, eh) by Yin and Rust analyzed 72,644 bioRxiv preprints posted between 2018 and 2025 that could be matched by DOI to a subsequent peer-reviewed publication.
Importantly, this only included preprints that were subsequently published. It doesn’t include manuscripts that were published as preprints and left there, so there’s a possibility for survivorship bias to be present.
They also focused only on abstracts, the consistency of claims (primary and secondary), and the degree of change in content from the preprinted version to the published version.
But main findings suggest hat the central claims in the abstracts of bioRxiv preprints that were subsequently published were generally stable following peer review. But, of course, with the caveat that this, again, focuses only on studies that essentially got published.
It could be the case that some unmatched preprints contain methodological problems, but others may remain unpublished because of rejections, long delays, changing author priorities, or limited resources.
If we return to the two meta-regressions, from the preprinted versions to the published versions, what changed? Well, not much. When larger differences are present, in my experience, they may include additional analyses requested by editors or reviewers. However, in many preprints that end up being published, the main conclusions remain broadly similar.
In my experience, disseminating our research early via preprints allowed us to get useful feedback. Actually, someone caught errors in our data spreadsheet that we managed to fix prior to actually sending the paper off for peer review.
If we focus only on published research in peer-reviewed journals, there’s also a point to be made about publication bias, which is a real issue.
It refers to the greater likelihood that statistically significant or positive findings will be published compared to non-significant findings. This can leave the literature unrepresentative of the actual effectiveness of a given intervention. With that in mind, p-hacking is also related to publication bias because these incentives may encourage researchers to exploit analytical flexibility or selectively report analyses in an attempt to “fish out” statistically significant findings. Btw. p-hacking is considered a questionable research practice, please refrain from doing it.
Many journal articles remain behind subscription paywalls. That makes science inaccessible to the masses. In contrast, preprints offer the benefit of being largely accessible to everyone. Preprints can also link to data repositories and analysis code, making it easier to independently reproduce or verify the analyses and improving transparency. So can published papers, but from what I’ve observed, preprints tended to also share the data more easily.
Conclusion
My overall thoughts are that preprints are generally a net positive. They fit within broader open-science practices, encourage more transparency, and can be used to actually improve the original work of the authors based on a large amount of feedback from a broader audience, and not just a few individuals during peer review.
Whether you’re communicating and disseminating a study that has been preprinted or one that has been officially published in a journal, both should be done with caution, appropriate nuance, and context behind them. These things are stable and shouldn’t change.
