How ‘Science’ Staff Avoided Getting Caught in Superconductor Whirlwinds

If your algorithm looks at all like mine, chances are you’ve heard about the LK-99 superconductor. On every social media platform, science enthusiasts were jumping at the idea of this room temperature, zero-resistance conductor. LK-99’s Seoul based creators from the Quantum Energy Research Centre, were ushering in a new future: one with ultra fast levitating trains and even faster computer chips.

But then, only a couple weeks later, the hype screeched to a halt. LK-99 was not a room temperature superconductor, but an odd slurry of metals and impurities that exhibited superconductor-like properties. Every scientific journal, newspaper, and tech blog had to backtrack their fresh new articles. No, LK-99 is not the next great leap forward in physics.

Somehow, it seemed no one from the press saw this coming, even though the story was pushed by some of the biggest names in news. And yet, David Malakoff, the International News Editor of Science says this slip up, “wasn’t the media’s responsibility.”

So how did we get here, and what was the press’s role in the LK-99 upset?

Well, it all started with a preprint— a research paper published without the standards of a peer review. Science, Malakoff says, can spend up to multiple years reviewing a paper before they publish it. This makes Science, and its British counterpart Nature, the go to for major news organizations sourcing important science discoveries.

When LK-99’s paper was released, many physicists approached it with caution. After all, “preprints can draw attention to papers that aren't very good,” Malakoff said. And draw attention it did. Science enthusiasts were the biggest drivers of the story towards the mainstream media. And with superconductors having the potential for innovating so many branches of science, more than a few had a business interest.

Still, major news outlets couldn’t resist writing about the social media frenzy. Some wrote about the race for scientists to begin replicating the preprint’s findings, or the skepticism that came with it. Many, like The New York Times, wrote all three types of stories.

Huge exposure to preprint paper findings doesn’t always reach this level, but stories like these do hit the front page from time to time. Science writing is a specialized type of journalism, and less experienced reporters may source from the wrong places.

Massive preprint servers, like arXiv and bioRxiv, can often lure in reporters and result in articles with faulty reliability. Still, “journalists love preprint servers,” Malakoff says. These sites can tip off enterprising journalists to big stories, if they go about it the right way.

Science staff writer Adrian Cho was able to cover the LK-99 story without making some of the same mistakes many reporters did. His decade-long familiarity with physics and science writing allowed him to very quickly see the paper’s potential uncertainties.

“There were lots of reasons to be skeptical of this result. And we were hoping to run something quickly. So, [an] "explainer" format seemed to be a good way to explain the reasons for the skepticism in a straight-forward way,” Cho said. His explainer reported on more than just the paper’s claims; it also uncovered the nebulous situation surrounding it. As Malakoff, and the rest of the science community says, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Making decisions like the one Cho made is what separates highly specialized writers from the average reporter, Malakoff says. Reporters should always be looking for multiple points of view in their articles by reaching out to experts in their story’s field through scientific societies or websites like SciLine, a website that connects journalists and scientists. Learning to avoid obscure journals, or “predatory journals'' that allow any paper to be published for a price, is an important skill for reporters to have too.

An experienced journalist is tasked with taking these measures, and most importantly, being transparent about the paper’s preprint nature.

“Journalists have to be a gatekeeper,” said Malakoff. “Even if you do everything right, [these situations are] sort of unavoidable.”