I am reviewing a bunch of fellowship applications this weekend. Many young candidates have listed papers as "submitted". I find that obsolete and potentially damaging. In 99% of cases, everything speaks in favor of depositing a paper on bioRxiv before submission.

It was correctly remarked that students/postdocs cannot preprint their work unless their PI agrees. If you are in that situation, I encourage you to show my post to your PI. If you apply and have nothing to show for your work, you are at a disadvantage.

It's becoming clear from the responses that such conventions are not always self-evident. Young scientists cannot be faulted for not knowing that "submitted" is bad and "submitted to Nature" is even worse. Please consider my tweets as a kind of remote mentoring