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

The "under review" status pill and when a moderator applies it — a second dataset Writing it up because I had to work it out twice and would rather nobody else did.

A question about how this site should cite something that has not been reviewed.

I want to reference a preprint in a maintained document. The convention I understand is to label the status in the sentence itself rather than in a footnote, and to record the date the version was checked.

Is that the whole convention, or is there a further step for the case where the preprint is later published with different numbers?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.