What are the boundaries between draft, manuscript, preprint, paper, and article?
paper = article: In the academic meaning of the words, papers and articles refer to the same thing: a published piece of writing. The term is used for journal papers or journal articles, which means they have been published by a journal, but also for less traditional publications, including self-publication (“Dr. Who just published a great paper on the intricacies of time travel on his webpage”) and e-print repositories such as arXiv (“check out the latest paper by Galileo on arXiv, that guy has mad ideas!”).
Some journals have different categories of “articles”, and differentiate between letters, communications, reports, reviews, and full papers (sometimes abbreviated as just “papers”). In usage I have seen, paper (or article) used as a generic term covers all of those: you would say, for example, that “letters and full papers are two types of articles”.
A preprint (more commonly used without the hyphen) refers to the distribution, in advance of formal publication, of something that will be published in print. The preprint may differ from the final publication.
Preprint status does not always indicate that the work has been formally accepted for publication. It just means the authors intend to publish it in a more formal venue (journal, book, etc.) but wanted to distribute by other means beforehand (preprints used to be distributed to colleagues as photocopies, but are now mostly circulated by email or repositories).
A manuscript is, in the New Oxford American Dictionary's words, “an author's text that has not yet been published”. Any piece of writing that you have not published in any way (but intend to) is a manuscript.
A draft is the same as a manuscript, except that it insists on the unfinished state of the manuscript.
Summarizing, I could say:
Here's the draft I've been working on, please amend it with your corrections. Once we have done this final round of revision, I will upload the manuscript to the editor's website, and we can start circulating it as a preprint to colleagues whom you think may be interested. Once it is accepted and published, we'll just send them the published version of the paper for their records.
In French, paper is definitely informal, while article is the term to be used in a written document.
However, in English I feel that we tend to use
- "journal article" more often that "journal paper",
- "conference article" less than "conference paper",
- "workshop article" far less often than "workshop paper".
So paper might tend to designate a piece of work of lesser importance than article, or as jakebeal said have a more general use. It still sounds slightly more informal to me, probably because I am a French native speaker, but I'm pretty sure many French colleagues of mine have the same feeling even if they work in some English-speaking country.
My field computer science > machine learning, in case the terminology changes from field to field, and my location is the US.
Some statistics (obviously biased by the corpus):
Journal paper vs. journal article:
Conference paper vs. conference article:
Workshop paper vs. workshop article:
I think that a piece of writing during the pre-submission stage is a draft and during the post-acceptance, but pre-publication, stage is a preprint. I think that this agrees with your terminology.
Many journals publish original research findings under a number of categories including articles, letters, and reports and in some fields books are the predominant mode of publishing research. Therefore, I would say that a preprint does not necessarily become a paper/article when published and instead becomes whatever it is.
Defining a manuscript is the hardest for me. I have often seen acknowledgements which thank someone for reading a previous version of the manuscript. This happens frequently enough in my field that I believe that a piece of writing becomes a manuscript prior to submission to a publisher. I am not sure when a piece of writing becomes a manuscript. I think a piece of writing becomes a manuscript when the first complete draft is completed.