A study that uses only a manipulation is considered a pre-experiment. As the name implies, a pre-experiment has not quite achieved the level of control necessary to be termed an experiment at all.
Source: wiktionary
Preexperiment
Synonyms for "preexperiment"
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Campbell and Stanley describe three forms of preexperiments: the one-shot case study, the one-group pretest–posttest design, and the static-group comparison.
Source: wiktionary
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.