The massive pre-print industry has influenced Zotero to make their a specific category for pre-print. This is a cognitive fallacy which only exacerbates the citation and reference chaos.

Pre-prints are manuscripts.... There are hand-written manuscripts, there are typescript manuscripts and there are computer generated manuscripts... Zotero already has manuscripts as a category... no need to add a new category.

To make matters worse, Zotero imports PDFs when it can find open access versions of them. The problem is that it imports them to the article/publication type when they are pre-prints rather than to the pre-print item type. This make authority version management in Zotero nightmare. Classic case (try importing) : https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663914565848

I am still hopeful that Zotero staff will find a clean and easy way to automatically link pre-prints to their authority version records within Zotero.