This is a continuation of a long topic, addressed by post number rather than by page. Start at post 1.
Post #28 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
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.
I checked the source rather than the summary, and they differ.
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.
It is the kind of thing that is obvious once and never again.
Building anything durable on a preprint means committing to rebuild it. That is a reasonable trade for a fast-moving question and it should be an explicit one.
Everything in post #34 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
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 step people skip is the one I have spelled out.
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 conclusion is tentative; the arithmetic underneath it is not.
Noted, and thank you for writing it out rather than summarising it.
I will take the caveat as seriously as the claim, which is the point of putting it there.
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.
Coming back to post #40, because the follow-up matters more than the original answer.
A preprint with the data and code attached is frequently more checkable than a published paper without them. Reviewed and reproducible are different properties.
Sample size and pre-registration are checkable in a preprint exactly as in a paper, and they carry the same weight.
If the premise is wrong, everything after it is decoration.
If you cite a preprint in a maintained document here, the convention is to label it in the sentence and to note the check date. The document review will catch the update.
That holds for the case as described. Change the assumptions and it may not.
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 would be interested in a counterexample if anyone has one.
On post #44 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
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.
No notes. Posting so the count is not one.
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 written this out at length because the short version keeps being misread.
Confirming post #48 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.
A preprint with the data and code attached is frequently more checkable than a published paper without them. Reviewed and reproducible are different properties.
Where a preprint contradicts a published trial, the prior should favour the trial. Where it extends one, the preprint can be genuinely useful.
The evidence for this is thinner than the way I have phrased it suggests.
Post #52 describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.
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.
It is the sort of thing that seems obvious in retrospect and was not at the time.
Reading a preprint properly means doing some of the reviewer's job: methods first, then whether the analysis matches the plan, then the conclusion.
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