A Case Study in Serendipity: Environmental Researchers Use of Traditional and Social Media for Dissemination

In the face of demands for researchers to engage more actively with a wider range of publics and to capture different kinds of research impacts and engagements, we explored the ways a small number of environmental researchers use traditional and social media to disseminate research. A questionnaire was developed to investigate the impact of different media as a tool to broker contact between researchers and a variety of different stakeholders (for example, publics, other researchers, policymakers, journalists) as well as how researchers perceive that their use of these media has changed over the past five years. The questionnaire was sent to 504 researchers whose work had featured in a policy-oriented e-news service. 149 valid responses were received (29%). Coverage in traditional media (newspapers, broadcast) not only brokers contact with other journalists, but is a good source of contact from other researchers (n=47, 62%) and members of the public (n=36, 26%). Although the use of social media was limited amongst our sample, it did broker contact with other researchers (n=17, 47%) and the public (n=10, 28%). Nevertheless, few environmental researchers were actively using social media to disseminate their research findings, with many continuing to rely on academic journals and face-to-face communication to reach both academic and public audiences.

[1]  Richard Holliman,et al.  Advocacy in the tail: Exploring the implications of ‘climategate’ for science journalism and public debate in the digital age , 2011 .

[2]  Bruce V. Lewenstein,et al.  Biotechnology and the American Media , 2002 .

[3]  J. David Kennamer,et al.  Public Opinion, the Press, and Public Policy , 1992 .

[4]  Dietram A. Scheufele,et al.  What's next for science communication? Promising directions and lingering distractions. , 2009, American journal of botany.

[5]  B. Trench.  Scientists’ Blogs: Glimpses Behind the Scenes , 2012 .

[6]  Martin W. Bauer,et al.  The Evolution of Public Understanding of Science—Discourse and Comparative Evidence , 2009 .

[7]  Sharon Dunwoody,et al.  Journalism and Social Media as Means of Observing the Contexts of Science , 2013 .

[8]  H. P. Peters.  Scientific Sources and the Mass Media: Forms and Consequences of Medialization , 2012 .

[9]  Sojin Kim.  Writing Science , 2000 .

[10]  Dietram A. Scheufele,et al.  Science, New Media, and the Public , 2013, Science.

[11]  Bridging the gap between science and policy: the importance of mutual respect, trust and the role of mediators , 2012 .

[12]  S. Dunwoody,et al.  Interactions with the Mass Media , 2008, Science.

[13]  Simone Rödder,et al.  The Sciences’ Media Connection – Public Communication and its Repercussions , 2012 .

[14]  Richard C. Atkinson,et al.  Center for Studies in Higher Education , 2009 .

[15]  Stuart Allan,et al.  Media, risk, and science , 2002 .

[16]  E. Weitkamp,et al.  Exploring the ways environmental science is used and valued by policy-makers in Portugal: A case study , 2012 .

[17]  A. Petersen,et al.  Opening the black box: scientists’ views on the role of the news media in the nanotechnology debate , 2009 .

[18]  Anne E. Lincoln,et al.  How Academic Biologists and Physicists View Science Outreach , 2012, PloS one.

[19]  Executive Summary,et al.  Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines - Executive Summary , 2010 .

[20]  Wim van der Stelt,et al.  Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications.: Executive summary , 2014 .

[21]  F. Marincola,et al.  How scientists use social media to communicate their research , 2011, Journal of Translational Medicine.