Academic research relevant to the workaday world of science writing
By Ben Carollo and Rick Borchelt
How are we making a difference? But wait, how would we even know!?!
From time to time, all of us will find ourselves wondering whether all of the blood, sweat, and tears that we put into our work are making a difference. If we all had extensive evaluation budgets (and the rule of thumb in industry is 15 percent of your operating budget should be formative and evaluative research), we could perform sophisticated analyses of each project to see how our work is driving people’s understanding of science issues (and we might even learn a thing or two about how to do our jobs better!). Unfortunately, very few of us have that luxury. However, there are a lot of academics in the field who are very interested in these questions, and in this issue we feature three articles that we hope will expand your thinking about the ways in which science writers make a difference in their professional, local, and global communities.
Mathelus, Sharon, Ginny Pittman and Jill Yablonski-Crepeau
Promotion of research articles to the lay press: a summary of a three-year project
Learned Publishing 25(3) (2012) 207-212.
Most NASW members are closely tied to the scientific publishing field in some way or other. Whether writing a press release for a recently published article or writing a newspaper story on new findings published in Nature, these publications drive a good part of the work that we do. We would not dream of breaking a publisher’s embargo, and if research did not end up in a top-tier journal, for many of us it might as well have never been conducted. This article begins to unravel how important this relationship is, and suggests that there is real value in the promotion of research findings from these journals in the lay press.
Blackwell Publishing (now Wiley-Blackwell) began promoting “newsworthy” articles on a case-by-case basis in 2004. Newsworthy was defined as original peer-reviewed research that generated controversial debate, conveyed a benefit or treatment, or provoked a robust discussion while being easily explained to various publics via the mass media. This effort was intended, initially, to disseminate research directly to media and public audiences. This study’s authors investigate whether there was a link between the use of a press release and an increase in the number of downloads or citations of an article. Notably, since the purpose of the program was to communicate to lay audiences, most of the studies chosen for press releases were observational studies, traditionally cited less often than randomized controlled trials.
The authors looked at the three-year period of 2004 to 2006 during which 296 press releases were produced across 99 of Wiley-Blackwell journals. For 71 percent of the articles (211) that had press releases, these articles were downloaded 1.8 times more frequently than the average article in the same issue. The authors conducted case studies on five of the articles and conducted further citation analysis of these articles. For these examples, citations increased as much 2.23 times compared to other articles in the same issue of the journal as well as for other articles in the journal throughout the year.
The authors are the first to admit two major limitations of this study: 1) The measurement of newsworthiness was not measured, and 2) there was not a control group identified to determine whether the observed effect would have happened in the absence of the press releases. It is reasonable to think that if something is actually “newsworthy” that people would pay attention to it regardless of the PR tactics. However, it is also reasonable to assume that without an additional push, there would still be many potentially interested audiences, both lay and technical, that would not learn of the discovery. Even motivated information seekers are unlikely to be able to track all new research developments in a field, and this study shows an additional level of evidence that science writers, PIOs, and the media play a vital role in prioritizing information for a wide variety of audiences.
There are many ways in which this issue could be further tested, but we think this raises an important philosophical issue as well. The analysis conducted in this paper is relatively straightforward and something that most people could do. The lesson here is that we should all be taking more time to evaluate our work. Even if we aren’t trained in evaluation techniques and cannot develop a flawless study design, we should still be trying to learn more about how we do our work and how we can continue to improve.
Iniquez, Gerardo, Julia Taguena-Martinez, Kimmo K. Kaski, Rafael A. Barrio
Are opinions based on science: Modeling social response to scientific facts
PLOS One 7(8) 2012
On the other hand, if you happen to have a Ph.D. in research method — or you hire a partner with one — you can design sophisticated, experimental computer models to run simulations about how people will interact in theoretical environments. The authors of this study designed a model that explores opinion formation in networks as a function of one-to-one discussions, personal perceptions of group opinions, and reactions to a common external influence similar to media. This model was developed as an effort to harness the knowledge gained from the many qualitative studies that have identified critical factors to opinion-making on scientific issues in a quantifiable way that reflects the various effects of personal knowledge, science communication, and cultural context.
The premise of the model is that each person has an opinion about scientific issues informed by their scientific education and cultural background, and that this opinion can change based on one-to-one interactions with other individuals. Additionally, there are external influences from the media and science communicators that might influence an individual’s perceptions on the issue. Finally, as people perceive the opinions of others in their social network, they may be inclined to adjust their opinions based on what others in their social network believe. The model tests for the effect of a wide range of variables, such as frequency of discussions about science, willingness to change opinions, level of scientific knowledge, and scientific accuracy of media coverage.
Interestingly, the simulations found that when information that is scientifically sound is introduced by the mass media (or, rather, their variable representing the mass media), naysayers will ultimately segregate themselves in a very tight-knit network, whereas those who embrace the accurate information grow in numbers, but stay less interconnected. Alternatively, when inaccurate scientific information is introduced by mass media, the experts remain dispersed in the community and do not develop tight networks to oppose the inaccurate information. The implication, as identified by the authors, is that scientifically sound concepts require a greater level of mass-media input to create opinion consensus since the naysayers more readily organize themselves in communities that prevent opinion consensus. The authors offer the real social network of creationists to illustrate that this model is accurate and suggest that this happens as a need to support each other in the face of commonly accepted notions.
The authors also note that there is a saturation point at which the mass-media effect slows down significantly and the community structure remains stable. They compared this model with survey results and believe that this is consistent with data showing how aggressive propaganda does not result in a proportional, immediate increase in agreement. Integrating survey data from the EU and Mexico in the analysis, the authors determined that cultural factors at the macro level play an integral role in driving perceptions and that in scientifically skeptical societies, a strong injection of accurate or inaccurate scientific information in the mass media will drive perceptions whereas limited presentation of this information in the mass media will tend to result in a roughly equal split in perceptions.
From our perspective, this greatly validates the work that NASW members do. It certainly stands to reason that in the absence of information people will be unable to form accurate opinions, so this reinforces the need to provide accurate information about science issues where people will have greatest access to said information. Though this research approach is in its nascent stages, there are a lot of exciting ways that such models like this could be used in the future to develop insights that will allow all of us in the field to be better informed in the way we do our work.
Linke, Sebastian
Contexts constrain science in the public: How the sociobiology debate was (not) presented in the German press
Public Understanding of Science 21(6) (2012) 740 -758
This article provides a real-life example of how some of these cultural and media influences can influence a scientific debate in a dynamic network. The author analyzes media coverage of sociobiology in the German press during two different time periods: 1975 to 1980 and 1990 to 1995. The author chose this initial time period on account of the highly charged academic debate that ensued following the 1975 publication of Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology — The New Synthesis. This nature versus nurture debate was deeply colored in Germany by cultural experiences with eugenics and racism. In the United States, this debate played out in popular culture in conjunction with the academic debate, while thought leaders widely engaged in public forums. This was not the case in all societies, however.
According to the author’s analysis, the sociobiology debate was largely absent in the German media until 1996, decades after the debate had played out in other countries. By the time this debate appears in the German media, it is greatly detached from the academic debate and presented as a very neutral concept. The author posits that the rise of the debate in Germany was linked to the broader discussion of life sciences related to cloning, stem cells, and biomedicine. The positive atmosphere that existed around these discussions thus created a safe space where this concept could be introduced, but even then it was often discussed solely in a metaphorical sense.
Linke speculates that at a broad level, this lag in media attention is the result of a population widely affected by the history of the Third Reich. In this “spectre of eugenics,” Germans became averse to any discussion that came anywhere near eugenics or social Darwinism. However, when the intellectual debate emerged following Wilson’s publication, there were some deeper issues at play in the German academic community. The leading German academic in the field, Konrad Lorenz, was diametrically opposed to Wilson’s work, but was essentially the sole German academic with any expertise on the matter. Unfortunately, he was not in a position to initiate a debate on the matter. Lorenz had very strong ties to the Nazi party, a matter of great criticism when he received the Nobel Prize in 1973. Wilson had been accused in the American press of trying to revive theories that led to the rise of Nazi Germany, and Lorenz chose to sit out of the debate to avoid similar backlash. Without a credible spokesperson to initiate the debate against Wilson, and a cadre of journalists averse to discussing the topic, the debate simply got left behind.
Taken together, these three articles reaffirm the importance of science writers in bringing socially salient issues to the attention of a wide range of audiences. But they also demonstrate that the path from science writing into social fabric is neither easy nor predictable. Thought leaders will often bring an issue to the table, but sometimes cultural constraints don’t allow these issues to be integrated into a broader societal dialogue. In the absence of information (accurate or not), societies will sit divided on an issue: Science writers can provide the rationale for decisions, but true public engagement with science and technology requires that a far more expansive set of actors become engaged.
Scholarly Pursuits features articles from the social science research community in the United States and abroad. If you read an article you think would make a good candidate for this column, send it along to rickb@nasw.org.
Ben Carollo leads the issues analysis and response team at the National Cancer Institute at NIH. Rick Borchelt is special assistant for public affairs to the director at the National Cancer Institute at NIH.
