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.