How this community labels and discusses unrefereed work

Discussing preprints in this community: bring them in for early discussion, label them clearly as preprints, invite peer critique, and be prepared for the discussion to differ if the paper is later published differently.

I am confident about the direction and much less about the magnitude.

Answering the community labels question as asked, then the question I think is meant. As asked: yes, with the qualification below. As meant: it depends on how the first measurement was taken.

Answering the question post #13 raises rather than the one it answers.

What I would want before treating community labels as settled: the method, the sample, and whether anyone tried to find the opposite result. Two of the three are usually missing.

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.

The disagreement above is smaller than it looks once the terms are fixed.

No disagreement from me. Posting only so the question does not look ignored.

Post #17 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.

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

This follows post #18 rather than contradicting it.

I have no financial interest in anything named in this thread and I want to say so before I comment on community labels, because it is the sort of subject where it matters.

Worth separating two things that post #20 runs together.

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

I would be interested in a counterexample if anyone has one.

Genuine question rather than a rhetorical one: has anyone here actually observed community labels, as opposed to read about it? The thread is long and I cannot tell.

Adding a reference point for community labels. Mine is a single case, collected without controls, and I am posting the method alongside it so it can be discounted appropriately.

Picking up post #22: that is the part I would want checked first.

Author track record is a weak signal and it is a signal. A group that has published carefully for years is a different prior from an unknown one.

I am not the right person to answer the follow-up to this.

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

Unrefereed work is not worthless. A great deal of it survives review substantially unchanged. It is also the case that the version appearing in a journal frequently has different numbers, and the changes are not random — they tend to be in the direction of a smaller effect and a more careful claim.

The version of community labels that circulates here is a simplification of a simplification. It is not wrong, but it has lost the conditions under which it holds, and those conditions are where the interesting cases live.

Adding a note of thanks rather than an opinion. I did not know most of that.

Marking my uncertainty on community labels explicitly. I am confident about the direction, much less confident about the size, and not confident at all that it generalises past the case in the first post.