If you can download it from arxiv, it is published. Researchers don’t really care whether the paper went through formal peer review and publication process in some journal, because that process is of little value: they can figure out that the author meant rank instead of rand etc.
"Published" in this context is short for "published to a journal" or more completely for this thread "gone through the full edit cycle you would expect from a paper published to a journal".
> When a article is published, the author may wish to indicate this in the abstract listing for the article. For this reason, the journal reference and DOI (Digital Object Identifier) fields are provided for articles.
This can only make sense if "public abstract on arxiv" is not the same as "published" in the way you mean.
I understand what it means, which you could have seen by reading my comment carefully. My point is that this publication process is of little value these days.
I believe you when you say you understand, but your first sentence was "If you can download it from arxiv, it is published." Which is precisely what GP was responding to.
Furthermore, this thread started with someone complaining about the lack of polish which the publication process can provide.
But explaining or footnoting everything defensively, rather than pointing out misconceptions as they arise, seems excessive.
Further, someone may deliberately use a minority definition in order to stress a philosophical point. One valid viewpoint is that a publication is a publication is a publication. A preprint, a blog post, or a peer-reviewed journal publication should be given equal weight as being "published." I'll call this position #1.
Another valid point is that some works are incomplete, and may go through multiple drafts before reaching the final, "published" form, which it's best known by, and is likely the most polished of the versions. I'll call this position #2.
Often people want feedback, and one way to get feedback is by publishing a preprint. (There are others. I recall reading of a mathematician, about a century ago, who would first publish in his home country, and native language, to get friendly feedback from colleagues, before publishing in English. He's cited for his later publication.)
Someone who holds position #1 might fully understand that I use the dictionary with position #2, and still deliberately use position #1 in order to popularize that #1 dictionary. The difference isn't one of confusion or lack of knowledge, but one of viewpoints.
Let me be clear - I'm not saying that that's the case here. Instead, my example is meant to show it's not necessarily so simple as "shares the same dictionary" or not.
There is definitely a difference between "public(ly available on arxiv)" and "published (in a peer-reviewed journal)". Depending what I want to do I may prefer on or the other for my work as a researcher.
Sure, but if the paper is never published in a journal, and just exist as a pdf on arxiv forever, you won’t treat it any different than if it was published. You’ll still ignore it if it looks crap, still read it if it looks promising, still tell your friends about it if it has interesting results, still cite it etc. In short, it doesn’t matter much if the paper was formally published.
The "doesn’t matter much" is, I think, the crux of the matter.
commandlinefan's earlier negative aside concerned language quality.
IMO, I think people hold peer-review journal published papers to a (slightly?) higher language quality standard than what may be the first of several preprints. And I think anamexis was pointing out that difference.
As Wikipedia says: "The immediate distribution of preprints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preprint
I expect that may include identifying and fixing typos.
