Is the rise of pre-prints lowering the quality and credibility of researcher and increasing the pressure to publish? From what I understand pre-prints have been common in some fields for many years because of some practical obvious reasons, for example very long lag time from submission to publication.
However, it is clear that publishing in pre-prints is becoming more and more popular across many fields with the main reason of calling yourself first to a particular research/method/idea/etc. The only problem is that these pre-prints are not peer-reviewed, and even though they require a certain standard, which is quite low, nobody is really checking the credibility and soundness of any of it. People might rush through the scientific process to publish a pre-print because the scrutiny level is almost non-existent. Some of this has been already observed with pre-prints about COVID https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/02/13/1558235/misleading-viral-claims-show-dangers-of-preprint-servers-researchers-warn, I think there's even no verification on affiliations.
The more pre-print papers are being published, the more these papers are being cited in peer-reviewed papers. They might be correct but nobody might check in detail as a reviewer or could even content since it's not &quot;published&quot;. In addition, usually citations such as &quot;in preparation&quot; or &quot;submitted&quot; are not accepted by many journals. It just seems that this could trigger a vicious cycle in which more non-peer reviewed papers are being cited in permanent publications which then remains in print for years to come.
Does the rise of pre-prints make science and publishing less credible?
Does it increase the pressure to publish because it adds an additional tier to the publishing process?
The people churning out garbage preprints are also churning out garbage papers in predatory journals which are &quot;peer reviewed&quot;.
The preprints aren't why these people are doing it. Being shit scientists driven by perverse incentives is why they're doing it.
Also I cite preprints all the time from people I know (either directly or by reputation) and it's not a problem because I don't need reviewers to tell me if a paper is good. I can read.