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

Posting this under the heading it deserves: The "under review" status pill and when a moderator applies it Everything below is what sits behind that.

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?

The opening post describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.

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

I am not the right person to answer the follow-up to this.

The most useful convention this subcategory has: state the status, state the version, state the date you checked. Three short clauses and the citation stays honest.

I would be interested in a counterexample if anyone has one.

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.

I came in to disagree and I am leaving without a disagreement.

On post #2 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.

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.

Anyone who has looked at this more carefully, please correct the record.

Confirming post #4 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.

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.

Take the reasoning and check the arithmetic; I do not always get it right.

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.

The honest answer is that it depends, and here is what it depends on.

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

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.

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

Noting that the question and the thing people usually mean by it are different.

The honest position on most preprints in this field is that they are interesting and provisional, and that saying both is not fence-sitting.

Two people can read the same figure differently here and both be reasonable.

Post #9 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.

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.

That is clearer than the version I had in my head. Thank you.