As scientists race to understand the coronavirus, the process of designing experiments, collecting data and submitting studies to journals for expert review is being compressed drastically. What typically takes many months is happening in weeks, even as some journals are receiving double their normal number of submissions. Science, one of the world’s most selective research outlets, published the structure of the spiky protein that the virus uses to enter host cells — crucial knowledge for designing a vaccine and antiviral drugs — nine days after receiving it, according to Holden Thorp, the journal’s editor in chief. “It’s the same process going extremely fast,” he says. Is there precedent in Science’s 140-year history? “Not that anybody can remember.”

For both experts and laypeople, being able to access dependable health advice has never felt more important, or challenging. The World Health Organization has described a “massive ‘infodemic’ — an overabundance of information, some accurate and some not — that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” Indeed, in recent weeks, new research has emerged that complicates such basic questions as who should wear face masks and when; what degree of physical separation is safe; and how the virus primarily spreads.

As a practice, science continuously interrogates and refines our understanding. “The answer is never so simple as ‘Masks work or masks don’t.’ It’s going to be ‘Under what conditions do masks have an effect?’ and ‘How much of an effect do they have?’ ” says Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “The questions that we want answers to are much more complicated than the evidence that we have at any one moment.” The problem is that now we want those answers to be definitive and fast.

That demand for conclusiveness highlights longstanding tensions over the role of a scientific journal. Should it be an arbiter of facts or a generator of new ideas? A keeper of the historical record or a predictor of the future? A private channel for scientists to communicate with one another or a megaphone with which they can reach the public? Or all of the above? “I think this whole pandemic has very much changed our view of ourselves,” says Richard Horton, the editor in chief of the British medical journal The Lancet. “We feel very much that we are publishing research that is literally day by day guiding the national and global response to this virus. And that is both daunting and full of considerable responsibility, because if we make a mistake in judgment about what we publish, that could have a dangerous impact on the course of the pandemic.”