I definitely think peer-reviewed research is likely of higher quality and people should treat it as such…but it’s certainly not the only quantitative data that’s worth sharing. Gallup and FiveThirtyEight.com share worthwhile quantitative data all the time. Peer review isn’t usually about accuracy, but often about novelty or how much some piece of data advances the science. Reviewers don’t reanalyze your data or make sure you actually did the methods you said you did. Rather, they assess how much your results advance the discipline you are in and whether that contribution is worthy of their journal…you could have an entirely accurate result…and reviewers will decline it because it’s not novel enough or because it’s hard to interpret, not because it’s inaccurate. Unless reviewers start auditing labs and datasets, they can’t really assess accuracy. The peer review process ends up being more about CV building, rather than sharing information….If it were truly about sharing information, we would see a lot more null results, failures to replicate, and insignificant findings, all of which are accurate results, but not novel enough….we’d see auditing of accuracy rather than novelty.

…but I digress, my main point isn’t really about the peer review process, but rather the fact that blogging is an inherently opinionated and subjective exercise, which is part of what readers sign up for….so unless people actually deceive others, I don’t see anything strange about blogging about one’s own amorphous non-peer reviewed research ideas. If people don’t like it, they can stop reading or comment on how crappy the post is…:) Indeed, the interactive medium invites more review in some ways (see Nate Silver and De Rugy’s thread above), just as you are somewhat reviewing this post by your comment.

Then, there’s the issue of (at least for certain kinds of research), wanting protection from, say, animal rights extremists. If that became an issue, it would almost certainly stop me from blogging my own research.

Conference proceedings are becoming increasingly available on line. That means your work can be more easily found before you have reached the publication stage.

I think that journals that are associated with major research universities will have less of a relative impact in the future in fields where research is not capital-intensive. Lesser journals will have an increasing relative importance since they can disseminate information worldwide at no greater cost than the older journals.