Preprints in COVID-19 news coverage: Comparing student and general population perceptions of preliminary science about booster vaccination.

News framing of preprint research during the COVID-19 pandemic varied widely, with some articles reporting the findings of preprint studies with a high degree of certainty and others highlighting the preliminary and unpublished nature of the work. As publicly available research articles that have not yet been peer-reviewed, preprints represent a unique form of scientific uncertainty in risk communication contexts, and we lack a complete picture of how public audiences respond to transparency about this uncertainty. Replicating and extending prior work, we examined how preprint disclosures and lexical hedging influenced COVID-19 booster vaccine attitudes and intentions in a college student sample (N = 837) and a general population sample (N = 431). Participants in both groups perceived the disclosure of preprint status. However, neither preprint disclosure nor lexical hedging had a direct effect on perceived trustworthiness of the news article or the scientists, nor on booster attitudes or intentions, replicating our prior findings. As preprints have begun to receive more attention in the media, it is important to make sure the public is properly educated about their tentative nature.