Cathleen O’GradyWithin a few months of the first known cases of COVID-19, scientists had published thousands of preprints on the mysterious outbreak that was becoming a raging pandemic, sparking a flood of news stories from media outlets accustomed to the more stately pace of peer-reviewed publications.
Now, an analysis of some of the most widely covered COVID-19 preprints has found that these outlets vary widely in the way they refer to preprints, with about half of their stories failing to mention that the research was unreviewed or otherwise unverified.The research is “timely and important,” says Abel Gustafson, a science communication researcher at the University of Cincinnati who wasn’t involved in the study.