Definition
Plain language
A research paper shared publicly before it has gone through formal peer review.
As stated in the literature
A manuscript posted to an open server (e.g., arXiv) prior to or independent of peer review; distinguished from its later published version, and a common source of harmless citation drift (wrong year or venue) that citation audits deliberately exclude.
Also called: preprints
Why it matters: It spreads findings early, but its details like year or venue often differ from the final version, so citation checks treat those mismatches as harmless.
For example, a researcher might post a paper on arXiv months before it appears in a peer-reviewed journal.
Heard on the show
“" Which is why I think the paper is going to land harder than its single-author preprint provenance suggests.”Episode 020 — The Compliance Gap: Why AI Says Yes and Does No