By Alice Fleerackers and Chelsea Ratcliff.
A news story describing a novel blood test for Alzheimer diagnosis. An analysis of how Donald Trump is redefining the word felon. A deep dive into a promising new approach to building AI models. These three seemingly different news stories have one thing in common. They report findings from preprints—research articles that are publicly available but haven’t yet been peer reviewed or published by a journal.
If you’ve never heard of preprints before, you’re not alone. Our new study suggests that more than half of readers are confused when they see the word preprint mentioned in a news story. For most people in our study, this held true even when they read a news story that included an explanation of the term. In fact, we found that over three-quarters of people who were shown an explanation like this weren’t able to define the term preprint accurately afterward.
In the study—published in October 2024 in Public Understanding of Science—we asked more than 1700 US citizens and college students to read a news story discussing a preprint study. In some cases, people read a version of the story that described the study as a “preprint” and explained what this meant (not peer reviewed or published in a scientific journal). In others, the research was labeled a “study,” with no mention that it hadn’t yet been peer reviewed or published in a journal. Afterward, we asked people to explain what they think the word preprint means when they see it in a scientific news story.
Our results suggest that how publics interpret the term preprint varies widely. Some of the definitions we analyzed showed a surprisingly in-depth understanding of these unvetted studies and their role in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. But others were wildly inaccurate, equating preprints to reprints of previously published work, un-proofread news stories, or even plagiarized content. In one of the most colorful definitions, a participant described a preprint as being “like a trailer for a movie. [It] Gives you what’s going to come.”
This considerable confusion in how public audiences interpret preprints is concerning, because stories mentioning these unvetted studies often make headlines. While many preprint findings change very little, if at all, by the time they are published in a journal, some preprints change dramatically or are never published at all.
If news audiences don’t understand that these changes are possible, media coverage of preprints could spread dangerous misinformation—as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic when highly flawed preprints gained wide public attention. Our study points to how important it is for journalists, scientists, and other science communicators to describe preprints in ways people can understand and use to make informed decisions about the science they encounter in the news. For audiences unfamiliar with the scientific publishing process, describing the research as a “preprint” that hasn’t been peer-reviewed or published in a journal may not be enough.
Webpage: chelsearatcliff.com. Twitter/X: @chelseawriting