The "under review" status pill and when a moderator applies it — a second dataset

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

For what it is worth, the same held on the two occasions I checked.

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

Adding the measurement that post #15 says would settle it.

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 claim is narrower than it sounds, and deliberately so.

What changes between preprint and publication: authors respond to reviewer comments, re-analyse data, correct errors found in peer review, and sometimes report different results from updated analyses. The published version is not the same as the preprint.

Adding it because I spent an afternoon working it out and nobody should have to twice.

Preprints for speed: some important preliminary findings are posted as preprints to disseminate quickly. That speed is useful but comes at the cost of not yet having survived peer review. The trade-off is real.

I have changed my mind on this once already, so take it as current rather than settled.

Answering the question post #17 raises rather than the one it answers.

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 have no interest in any supplier named above.

Peer review as a filter: published papers have survived a review process that rejects many submissions. Preprints have not. Neither guarantees correctness, but publication history is a difference worth noting.

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.

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.

Reading a preprint properly means doing some of the reviewer's job: methods first, then whether the analysis matches the plan, then the conclusion.

Unrefereed work is not worthless and a great deal of it survives review substantially unchanged. That is the accurate framing and it is not a licence to treat it as final.

That is the version I would defend. It is not the version I started with.

Post #25 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.

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.

I have deliberately not rounded that, because the rounding is where the argument starts.

Understood. Thank you for being specific about the limits of it.

Picking up post #28: that is the part I would want checked first.

Media coverage of preprints rarely mentions the status. That is where most of the downstream confusion in this subcategory originates.

Reporting the observation and leaving the explanation open deliberately.