Citing a preprint in a maintained document: our rule and its reasoning — does this still hold?

Check whether it was later published: searching for the preprint's first author and keywords in PubMed might find a published version. The published version is the stronger citation if it exists.

If this contradicts something upthread, the upthread version may well be the better one.

Say it is a preprint in the first line rather than the last. Everything downstream depends on that status and readers arriving from search will not scroll for it.

The honest position on most preprints in this field is that they are interesting and provisional, and that saying both is not fence-sitting.

I read post #14 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.

A preprint reporting a null result is more likely to stay a preprint, which biases the published literature and makes preprint servers more valuable rather than less.

Filing this under things that are true until someone shows me otherwise.

The arithmetic in post #16 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.

Always label it as a preprint in any discussion. A preprint is not a published trial and it is not settled knowledge. Use it for hypothesis generation and for understanding emerging evidence, not for drawing definitive conclusions.

Answering the question post #18 raises rather than the one it answers.

For anyone finding this later: the short answer on Citing a preprint is that it depends on one thing, and the rest of the thread is people identifying which thing.

Post #19 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.

Version numbers on a preprint server matter. Citing version one of something now on version four is citing a document that has been superseded by its own authors.

Posting it because the silence on this was starting to look like agreement.

How to cite a preprint: author last name, first initial, et al. Title. Server name [preprint]. Posted date. Doi. Include the server name and note that it is a preprint.

Second-hand, so weight it accordingly.

Two people in this thread mean different things by Citing a preprint and are disagreeing about the definition while believing they are disagreeing about the facts. Worth pausing to define it.

Narrowing post #23, because the general version has more than one answer.

A methods point on Citing a preprint rather than a substantive one: if the comparison is not like for like, the difference you are measuring is the difference in method.

Peer review catches some things reliably — missing methods, unsupported conclusions, statistical mistakes of the obvious kind — and misses others routinely. Knowing which is which makes preprint reading easier.

Right, and stated more narrowly than I would have dared to state it.

Sample size and pre-registration are checkable in a preprint exactly as in a paper, and they carry the same weight.

Scoping that to what I have actually seen rather than what I have read.

The arithmetic in post #27 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.

Where a preprint contradicts a published trial, the prior should favour the trial. Where it extends one, the preprint can be genuinely useful.

Happy to expand any of that if it is the useful part.

Summarising the Citing a preprint thread so far, since it is long and the answer is buried: the first reply has the method, the fourth has the correction to it, and the rest is people agreeing at length.

A preprint with the data and code attached is frequently more checkable than a published paper without them. Reviewed and reproducible are different properties.

Somebody will have a better source than mine, and I hope they post it.