research methodology and statistics

hi friends, not sure how it works in other fields, but in medicine and adjacent scientific fields, preprints are not only a good addition, but a solid model of sharing your final drafts of research papers with the community (and possibly benefitting from it). what are preprints? preprint is a version of your final draft that has been made public, usually by submitting it on a specific portal (biorxiv, medrxiv, researchsquare, preprints.org,...). it is NOT a journal submission/publication, it is NOT a peer review, it CAN NOT be cited in the same way as the peer-reviewed journal-published paper can. (it still can be cited, but with an explicit mention that it is a preprint) why do it? publishing (especially in journals with high impact factor) takes months. literally. from the moment of finishing the draft, till publication, 3-6 months could pass in peer-review, revisions, rejections, etc. preprint helps to: 1) bypass the waiting period by allowing your peers to interact with the publication prior to its publishing in the journal. anyone could read it, cite it, download it, comment on it. 2) create visibility to the whole scientific community almost immediately 3) immediately share the findings, invite scrutiny, gather ideas for improvement of the draft. ALSO!!! the article receives a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). in research, DOI is a big deal. more on that later, but you do want your article to have a DOI. one might say that if theres no DOI -- it didnt happen. again: 1. it is a complete scientific work (as preprint repositories will PERFORM SCREENING, prior to publication on the website) 2. it is publicly available, ie open-access 3. it is not yet a certified peer-reviewed journal article, nor does it replace it 4. it can be later published in the journal (given it does not explicitly oppose preprinted articles -- rare, but worth checking beforehand) where to publish a preprint given i have a paper on standby? there are many different preprint repositories, each one having its own benefits or focuses: -bioRxiv -- repository for biology and life sciences. widely used in molecular biology, immunology, microbiology, neuroscience, and related fields. not intended for clinical medicine involving direct patient care decisions. -medRxiv -- repository for clinical and health sciences. used for epidemiology, public health, clinical research, health policy, and medical studies. screens submissions more strictly due to clinical implications. -arXiv -- one of the oldest and largest preprint servers. it covers physics, mathematics, computer science, statistics, quantitative biology, and related fields. -preprints.org -- a multidisciplinary repository operated by MDPI. accepts a wide range of subject areas, including biomedical, social sciences, and interdisciplinary research. -researchsquare -- multidisciplinary preprint platform. often integrated with journal submission workflows. it hosts life sciences, health sciences, and broader academic fields. thats all for now!!! see ya!!! (shameless plug: i published my first preprint ever and would be really happy if you could go check it out: preprints.org/manuscript/202602.0793) THANK YOU!!!