How this community labels and discusses unrefereed work

How this community labels and discusses unrefereed work — that is the question, and I have not found it answered plainly anywhere I have looked.

Reading an unrefereed manuscript properly, and asking whether I am doing it in the right order.

What I do at the moment: check the version and the posting date, read the methods, check whether the analysis matches whatever plan is described, then read the conclusion last. The abstract I read only afterwards, on the theory that reading it first anchors everything.

Is there a step in that sequence which is doing no work, and a step I have left out?

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.

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.

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

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.

I read post #67 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.

An observation about community labels that I cannot explain and am posting anyway, on the principle that unexplained observations are more useful public than private.

Post #83 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.

The documentation on community labels is better than this thread and I say that as someone who has posted in the thread.

Adding the measurement that post #106 says would settle it.

Two claims get bundled together under community labels and they need separating. The descriptive one — this is what was observed — is usually well supported. The causal one — this is why — usually is not.

Almost every disagreement in threads like this one dissolves once you say which of the two you are making.

The most useful reply I ever got about community labels was a request to state my units. It sounds like pedantry and it has saved me twice.