better to cite pre-print or thesis

Question

When I submitted my PhD thesis, the journal article version of one of the chapters was under review. A preprint of it is up on ArXiv. It was eventually rejected, not with particular faults so much as lacking sufficient impact for the journal I submitted it to.

I left academia after, so I never really came back to that paper to submit it elsewhere.

It's now ~6 years later and I am working on an idea in collaboration with researchers at another university in a significantly different field. One idea from that paper would actually be very useful for the problem we are working on.

When it comes to writing it up should I cite the preprint, or should I cite my thesis? I am thinking I should cite my thesis chapter, but I wanted to check.

Answer 1

An accepted dissertation is expected to have undergone a level of review more rigorous than the arXiv "does it look like a scientific article"-one-glance-check. This is a reason in favour of citing a dissertation over a preprint.

On the other hand, dissertations are frequently not easily and reliably accessible. Preprints on the arXiv are probably the best we have in that category. This counts in favour of citing an arXiv preprint over a dissertation.

Beyond that you should consider which of the texts would actually be more helpful to your prospective reader. The preprint might be more self-contained than the dissertation chapter, the dissertation chapter on the other hand might benefit from having the extra context right there.

In most cases, my recommendation would be to just cite them both.

Answer 2

I recommend that you cite the one that contains (or references) more complete overall context. If the preprint is just a chapter and it cites the larger thesis it should be fine, provided that the thesis is obtainable in some reasonable way.

Note, however, if the thesis has been submitted for publication and you are writing something new that requires citation, you might be able to depend on the delays in publication of the newer work to delay the final choice.

Citation of formally published work (that is, neither of the choices you propose) is preferable for many reasons, the most important of which is the vetting provided by the review that reputable publishers provide.

Also note that there may be no block in citing both.

But the context is important. Don't cite in a way that hides important other context that might be needed by readers or those that intend to extend your work.

Answer 3

I would simply cite both if there is no limit on the number of references. Citations are there first of all to make it easier for readers to find relevant information, and arXiv is much easier to find online than someone's thesis. On the other hand, thesis is an official publication and may contain some addituonal detail, so skipping it would be strange.