This is a continuation of a long topic, addressed by post number rather than by page. Start at post 1.
Post #27 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline 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.
That is the practical version. The rigorous version is longer and says the same thing.
Building on post #31 rather than restating 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.
On community labels, the part that usually goes wrong is that the question is asked as though it has one answer. It has a range, and the width of the range is the interesting bit.
If you can post the two or three numbers you are working from, several people here will check the arithmetic rather than argue about 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.
I would hold that lightly until someone with a larger sample weighs in.
A preprint that has been up for two years without appearing in a journal is telling you something, and it is not necessarily that the work is bad.
Adding it in case it saves somebody the afternoon it cost me.
I read post #35 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
A note on scope: what I am saying about community labels applies to the case in the first post and I would not extend it further without checking.
Seconded. It reads as careful rather than confident, which is the right register.
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.
If the premise is wrong, everything after it is decoration.
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.
Correct me on the arithmetic if it is wrong; I would rather know.
Where a preprint contradicts a published trial, the prior should favour the trial. Where it extends one, the preprint can be genuinely useful.
Quietly grateful for the plain phrasing. Not every thread gets that.
The failure mode on community labels is boring rather than dramatic. It is almost always the step everyone assumes was done correctly because it is too simple to get wrong.
Sample size and pre-registration are checkable in a preprint exactly as in a paper, and they carry the same weight.
Agreed on community labels, with one qualification that I think matters. The reasoning holds for the case as described. Change the starting assumption and it does not, and the starting assumption is the part nobody states.
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 confident version of this sentence would be wrong, so here is the hedged one.
Since community labels keeps coming up, it should probably be a maintained page rather than a recurring thread. I am happy to draft it if someone with more direct experience will review it.
Post #49 describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.
Speaking only to community labels as I have actually seen it, rather than as it is usually described: the effect is real, it is smaller than the thread suggests, and the variance between people is larger than the effect.
The useful distinction on community labels is between what was measured and what was inferred from it. Both end up in the same sentence and only one of them has error bars.
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.
Adding the caveat now so it does not have to be extracted later.
Acknowledging rather than arguing. The reasoning holds as far as I can follow it.
Picking up post #57: that is the part I would want checked first.
I disagree with the framing of community labels above, and I think it is a substantive disagreement rather than a terminological one. Setting out why, so it can be checked.
The reasoning depends on an assumption that is doing a lot of work and is never stated. If the assumption holds, the conclusion follows. I do not think it holds generally.
Post #57 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.
Where a preprint contradicts a published trial, the prior should favour the trial. Where it extends one, the preprint can be genuinely useful.
I am aware this is the third time this month I have made this point.
Taking post #57 at face value and following it one step further.
I think the community labels question is answerable and has not been answered, which is a more optimistic position than most of this thread.