SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, hosts preprints and working papers in economics, law, finance, management, and other social science disciplines. It was founded in 1994 and now contains over a million papers. Researchers upload working papers before formal publication, and the site provides download statistics and citation tracking. Many economics and finance papers appear here first, sometimes years before journal publication.

The platform is free to read, though downloading some papers may require a free account. It's widely used by economists, legal scholars, and business researchers who want early access to new work. The comment and download counts give a rough signal of a paper's visibility, though they are not a substitute for peer review. For anyone following research in these fields, it's a valuable complement to arXiv.