Much Ado about Something: Insights into the Science Communication Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I. Introduction The discussion of media and science communication is not a new one, and the roles of scientists and journalists in the reporting of health and medical research has long been analyzed, criticized, discussed and fussed over. Among the many areas in need of improvement, some say that the media is guilty of committing the sin of omission, (1) while others say that scientists are to blame for their poor lay communication skills. (2) However, one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the media has a big, albeit complex, impact on the public understanding of science. Moreover, public opinion plays a role - to varying degrees - in health care policies, in research funding, and in how members of the public make decisions about their own or families' healthcare. (3) Given the strong media interest in allergy and asthma research and education in Canada, (4) this area provides an opportunity to examine the science communication process. Insights from this process may help to inform future communication strategies, including the development of relevant research policies; educating patients, caregivers and the general public; and addressing issues in allergy and asthma in general. While health news may arise in many contexts, a common venue for media coverage of health research is scientific meetings. In order to further explore media coverage in the field of allergy and asthma, I took advantage of a recent expedition to New Orleans for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (AAAAI) to observe this one process of science communication in action. Through observations of poster presentations and media interviews, as well as unstructured interviews with an academic researcher and a media representative, a rough sketch of one particular forum for science communication emerges. (5) II. Background In some fields, asthma and allergy included, the scientific meeting is a crucial mechanism for knowledge dissemination and networking and is also a common site for media attention of new research findings. Some have questioned the usefulness of media reports from scientific meetings, mainly due to the preliminary nature of much of the results being presented in this context. One study found that a quarter of the abstracts that receive media coverage are never published in peer-reviewed journals for a number of reasons ranging from rejection to manuscripts never being submitted for peer review. (6) A later study found that a very small percentage of news stories that reported on abstracts from scientific meetings reported limitations, risks, and more importantly, the preliminary nature of the results being presented. (7) Another useful point to mention is the use of press releases as a source of information for journalists, common practice at large scientific meetings. One study of press releases from U.S. medical centers found that a considerable amount of media coverage of health news is based on press releases and that some of the exaggeration and omission of risks and limitations of research originate in press releases, and not necessarily with the media. (8) While a comparison of scientific abstracts, press releases and published news articles is a useful gauge, it is also important to understand what happens between point A (a scientific abstract) and point B (a news article). III. Media at a Scientific Meeting The AAAAI annual meeting provides a useful snapshot of media coverage of health news. First, picture a large venue, thousands of people, and a tightly packed five-day schedule. Academic scientists and researchers from around the world are presenting their research to their peers and interested parties, including media representatives. At any given point in the day, there are dozens of options to attend a workshop, seminar, debate, oral or poster presentation. There can be two ways of looking at the science communication process in the situation mentioned above: from a journalist's perspective and from a researcher's perspective. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".