Working Papers

Working papers are pre-publication versions of academic or policy articles, book chapters, or reviews. Posted papers are typically in progress, with preliminary findings, tables and data descriptions, but the work is far enough along and ready to be shared. These working papers are generally offered in the interest of personal and public scholarship: they serve to notify others in the same academic community that a person happens to be working on a particular problem, which opens up the work to a wide audience and furthers public dialogue. Authors will write working papers to share ideas about a topic or to elicit feedback before submitting to a peer reviewed conference or academic journal. Working papers are often the basis for related works, and may in themselves be cited by peer-review papers.