There's a lot of research papers out there - some good, some bad, some intelligible, some unintelligible, some disseminated quickly, some slowly. Now, with covid-19, it is more important than ever that we get to know whether a research paper should be trusted, and as many as possible of the relevant people should be able to understand it as quickly as possible. The phrases in italics refer to key problems with the system for creating and disseminating knowledge. The purpose of this note is to explain how a few publications of mine are relevant to tackling these problems.

Just after deciding to write this note, I received a "nature briefing" email from the journal Nature summarising some of their latest highlights. One thing that caught my eye was a paper entitled "Suppression of COVID-19 outbreak in the municipality of Vo’, Italy" (E. Lavezzo et al. Preprint at medRxiv http://doi.org/ggsmcj). According to the Nature summary: "On 21 February, the town of Vo’ reported Italy’s first COVID-19 death, leading authorities to ban movement in the town and end public services and commercial activities there for two weeks. Andrea Crisanti at Imperial College London and his colleagues swabbed almost every resident of Vo’ for viral RNA at the beginning and end of the lockdown. ... The team found that some 43% of the people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the town reported no fever or other symptoms. The researchers observed no statistically significant difference in potential infectiousness between those who reported symptoms and those who did not."

The paper in question was posted on https://www.medrxiv.org/ which describes itself as a preprint server for health sciences. There is a warning on the top of each page that the paper is "not certified by peer review". This seems to imply that once it has been "certified" - by a couple of "peers" chosen by the editor of the journal - then its contents must be right, trustworthy or whatever. This assumption is implicit in the journalistic practice of giving the name of the journal a research paper appears in with the implied "must the right, it's published in this prestigious journal". The paper was posted on 18 April 2020. I am writing this two weeks later and there has been no update: surely given the urgency ...

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