How should journalists cover coronavirus preprint studies?

When a story in the Los Angeles Times recently claimed that the novel coronavirus behind COVID-19 had mutated into a more contagious version, it was quickly amplified by other outlets and stoked fears that the virus was becoming more dangerous. The problem is, that wasn't necessarily true. Scientists quickly took to Twitter to point out the research paper the story was based on was a preprint - a first draft of scientific findings. The research had flaws of its own, several scientists said, and was overstating its conclusions about the contagiousness of the virus. Headlines that don't stand up to scrutiny are among the perils of covering preprint scientific articles, which have yet to go through the academic rigor of peer review - a process in which experts in the field evaluate a study, critique it, and recommend new experiments or more cautious conclusions before clearing the study to be published. During the pandemic, preprints abound as researchers scrambling to understand the coronavirus try to share their preliminary results as quickly as possible. But with the public hungry to get word of strange symptoms, new treatments or useful predictions, news coverage of preprints could unintentionally share bad information if journalists aren't vigilant, says Sharon Dunwoody , emeritus professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.