Peter Suber cites this article (11 page PDF) saying "Preprints are increasingly treated as legitimate, autonomous objects of citation independent of their later publication status... I'm fine with this, and so are the authors of this study." So am I. As Suber writes, "I'm from the humanities, where it's common to cite unpublished letters and manuscripts, countless fiction and nonfiction genres never subject to peer review, and even an occasional 'personal communication to the author'. Cite your best sources, or your actual sources, and let readers judge their relevance and credibility." Indeed, we might think of citation of a preprint (the way I'm doing here) as a form of unofficial, distributed and decentralized peer review.
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