I wrote a whole thing and it sounds super condescending. I’ll leave it here but I’ll let you know I only wanted to tell people about Pre-prints and ArXiv as a whole, it was never my intention to disrespect you or any others! I even had to add this first paragraph as I felt bad about it… But here goes:
Most papers I’ve seen are written in MS Word.
In Physics, which I admit is what these people work in, papers written in LaTeX are more common. But still, not most of them are. No clue about Computer Science and stuff, I mostly work in Nanotechnology, Biotechnology and stuff, so mostly physics and bio stuff (…can you tell which of these fields is mine and which I’m only tangentially related to? Hahaha)
After they are written in MS Word or paint, they are submitted for review. If they are approved (probably after a few rounds of revisions) they are submitted to the editors, which turn the paper into something that does not look written in MS Word.
But this is arXiv. It’s a pre-print server. People submit their papers before they go through the whole peer review process. Which means that these papers can have a few very significant mistakes, or even be fraudulent or wrong. That would be my main concern.
Of course, most of these pre-prints are not the final version of any paper - typically people submit them to pre-prints for a few reasons, while the paper is in peer review. Or often the paper has even already been accepted for publication, but they submit the version without any sort of peer review to the pre print server (I’m actually very early in my scientific career and only have one paper as first author, so this is the part I don’t remember as well. I think we submitted it to ArXiv after it was accepted for publication, but before it was published, and we sent the earliest draft we had submitted for review). These reasons are, off the top of my head:
The paper gets out faster, so people can see their amazing results earlier. Especially if they are worried about being the first to publish, as it’s very common for a reviewer with vested interests to block a paper from being published while they work on a very similar project. It’s not plagiarism per se, as these are loooong projects and typically the reviewer would already have a very mature project that they heavily invested in.
Most if not all journals are OK with the pre-print being freely available even after the article is published, even if the journal itself has a hefty fee for accessing the paper (or even for allowing your paper to be Open Access, which is typically very expensive for authors…)
Finally, a smaller reason: this is the paper as the authors intended, before those pesky reviewers got their hands on it. For you and I this is a negative, for authors this can be a positive. Often, reviewers will have their own interests and ask you to change your paper accordingly, most often by citing one of their papers… The peer review process is anonymous, but somehow you can always tell when this happens!
So: don’t worry about the formatting, worry about the content! Let’s wait until this passes - or fails - peer review before accepting it or discarding it. It could be super exciting results! Or a big pile of nothing.
The paper gets out faster, so people can see their amazing results earlier.
That’s precisely the problem of the entire superconductivity-at-room-temperature field and what I’m implying with the “MS Word”-remark. No other field of physics suffers so many retractions and outright data falsifications than superconductivity.
Supcerconductivity at room teperature is a holy grail that was claimed to have been achieved for the last 25 years, and every time it was either unreplicatable or data falsiciation. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - and this is what every other field seems to understand. The first direct observation of gravitational waves happened in September 2015, but the observing teams took 6 months to verify their findings before going public. The first direct observation of gravitational waves from a neutron star merger was discovered in August 2017, but only made public one month later - even though the event was accompanied by electromagnetic counterparts, and everybody in the field already knew what had happened, because it was impossible to keep secret. Still, their took their time to properly check and present their results.
Now I’m seeing a MS Word paper with a few plots in it, claiming not only the holy grail of superconductivity at room temperature but also claiming to achieve it at ambient (i.e. “normal”) pressures. A double holy grail. That’d be like the holy grail just fucking right off and god themselves outright appearing as an author on the paper.
No sorry, this I just can not believe in the slightest.
You seem to be very knowledgeable about this field so I won’t try to change your mind, as I can tell you’re more familiar than I am. In fact, I also have my own reservations from reading the actual paper. The same authors actually have another paper in the same topic with the same material with a preprint out after this one, and I doubt someone would salami publish results as marvelous as these ones instead of just going for a single massive impact factor journal.
yeah my concern is definitely moreso with the lack of peer review as opposed to using MS Word. LaTeX is definitely common but I’ve seen a fair few written in word. A lot of times they’ll also get converted to whatever format the journal is using, if said journal is “fancy” enough.
I wrote a whole thing and it sounds super condescending. I’ll leave it here but I’ll let you know I only wanted to tell people about Pre-prints and ArXiv as a whole, it was never my intention to disrespect you or any others! I even had to add this first paragraph as I felt bad about it… But here goes:
Most papers I’ve seen are written in MS Word.
In Physics, which I admit is what these people work in, papers written in LaTeX are more common. But still, not most of them are. No clue about Computer Science and stuff, I mostly work in Nanotechnology, Biotechnology and stuff, so mostly physics and bio stuff (…can you tell which of these fields is mine and which I’m only tangentially related to? Hahaha)
After they are written in MS Word or paint, they are submitted for review. If they are approved (probably after a few rounds of revisions) they are submitted to the editors, which turn the paper into something that does not look written in MS Word.
But this is arXiv. It’s a pre-print server. People submit their papers before they go through the whole peer review process. Which means that these papers can have a few very significant mistakes, or even be fraudulent or wrong. That would be my main concern.
Of course, most of these pre-prints are not the final version of any paper - typically people submit them to pre-prints for a few reasons, while the paper is in peer review. Or often the paper has even already been accepted for publication, but they submit the version without any sort of peer review to the pre print server (I’m actually very early in my scientific career and only have one paper as first author, so this is the part I don’t remember as well. I think we submitted it to ArXiv after it was accepted for publication, but before it was published, and we sent the earliest draft we had submitted for review). These reasons are, off the top of my head:
So: don’t worry about the formatting, worry about the content! Let’s wait until this passes - or fails - peer review before accepting it or discarding it. It could be super exciting results! Or a big pile of nothing.
That’s precisely the problem of the entire superconductivity-at-room-temperature field and what I’m implying with the “MS Word”-remark. No other field of physics suffers so many retractions and outright data falsifications than superconductivity.
Supcerconductivity at room teperature is a holy grail that was claimed to have been achieved for the last 25 years, and every time it was either unreplicatable or data falsiciation. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - and this is what every other field seems to understand. The first direct observation of gravitational waves happened in September 2015, but the observing teams took 6 months to verify their findings before going public. The first direct observation of gravitational waves from a neutron star merger was discovered in August 2017, but only made public one month later - even though the event was accompanied by electromagnetic counterparts, and everybody in the field already knew what had happened, because it was impossible to keep secret. Still, their took their time to properly check and present their results.
Now I’m seeing a MS Word paper with a few plots in it, claiming not only the holy grail of superconductivity at room temperature but also claiming to achieve it at ambient (i.e. “normal”) pressures. A double holy grail. That’d be like the holy grail just fucking right off and god themselves outright appearing as an author on the paper.
No sorry, this I just can not believe in the slightest.
You seem to be very knowledgeable about this field so I won’t try to change your mind, as I can tell you’re more familiar than I am. In fact, I also have my own reservations from reading the actual paper. The same authors actually have another paper in the same topic with the same material with a preprint out after this one, and I doubt someone would salami publish results as marvelous as these ones instead of just going for a single massive impact factor journal.
yeah my concern is definitely moreso with the lack of peer review as opposed to using MS Word. LaTeX is definitely common but I’ve seen a fair few written in word. A lot of times they’ll also get converted to whatever format the journal is using, if said journal is “fancy” enough.