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| Andy Tattersall |
Academics are increasingly being sold the
benefits of working with the media as an effective way of gaining impact
and presenting their work to a wider audience. Yet all too often media
coverage of research has no direct link to the research it is referring
to. The general public are used to seeing news stories that say
‘researchers have found’ or ‘researchers from the university of’ yet
these reports
are often lacking when it comes to linking to or citing the actual
research. Academics dealing with the media should make a point of
insisting on linking to their original research outputs where applicable
as there are several benefits. Given that Oxford Dictionaries just
named ‘post-truth’ as their word of 2016, we need to do everything we can to ensure fact retains its importance in the reporting of research.
Allow the public to see for themselves what the researchers found
How research is framed in the media can be
very important as not all research is reported accurately. Giving links
so that readers can fact-check is almost effortless if the
corresponding academic insists on this at the point of writing the
story. Of course this depends on how accessible the research is but
there should be a link to the open access version or at the very least
the abstract of the research. Certain national newspapers are very good
at cherry-picking parts from a piece of research to provide an
attention-grabbing headline. This can be extremely problematic in the
reporting of health news and websites such as the NHS’ Behind the Headlines
addresses misreporting of health news stories. The problem is that most
people reading the news are not aware of such resources, but adding the
original link to the research in the hypertext or as a reference at the
end of the paper copy gives readers direct access to the published
work. Of course that does not mean they will read the original work, but
it does open up the possibility. It also saves interested parties from
trying to track down the original paper, the title of which is rarely
reported in full, so what is lost by adding the links to the research?
Remember, it is much harder for a journalist to misreport your work if
you insist on linking to what you actually wrote.
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Newspaper Stand by Yukiko Matsuoka. CC BY 2.0 license. |
Track mentions of your research
Tools such as Altmetric.com, Kudos and
ImpactStory use unique identifiers to track the attention a piece of
published research receives. So when someone publishes a peer-reviewed
research article it receives a digital object identifier (DOI), or it
could be a PubMed ID, ISBN, or other such identifier. If a piece of
research is covered in the media and there is no link to the research
via these identifiers it can miss out on being picked up by altmetric
tools. The researchers may know about this coverage, and perhaps their
institution’s media team might too, but what about departmental peers,
managers, colleagues in the research office or library? What about the
funders? All of these are interested parties and coverage in the media,
whether this is a specialist research blog or an international
publication, is worthy of attention, especially when we are trying to
capture that elusive ‘impact’.
Follow the long tail of your scholarly communications
If you are a researcher working with the
media to help disseminate your findings then it is presumable that you
would be interested in how that research is being covered. With many
online media platforms, whether blogs or news sites, it is common for an
article to be republished elsewhere. If your work is covered on one
media platform it might be picked up and published on another, and that
second platform may carry more influence than the first. The problem is
this: how do you know this has happened if there is no way of tracking
back? Of course you might find your work covered on the web by carrying
out a search, but that is hardly scientific. By insisting on linked DOIs
or similar recognised identifiers then you should be able to discover
where your news coverage has been republished using tools like
Altmetric.com. In addition it allows you to discover how third party
websites may have interpreted your research. You may not be interested
in whether your research has been covered in the media, but I guarantee
you would be if it was widely misreported.
Question the journalist’s motives
We cannot expect everyone who reads about published research
in the media to fully understand what it might mean. That is why the
media writes in such a way as to break down the scholarly communication
into easier-to-read lay summaries. Yet researchers have to understand
that if you work with the media it may report your research in a way
that you do not totally agree with. Journalists may focus on one part of
your research in particular, they may even be critical of it, and how
they form the story may depend on their platform’s agenda, editor or
owner. This problem is exacerbated by social media; the general
population can now publicly comment on news stories and so potentially
perpetuate the bias reported by inaccuracies in the original news story.
The tone and angle applied by a journalist to a news story can
potentially be addressed if links to the original research and lay
summary are added to the news article.
If a journalist or news site is unwilling
to link to your published research then you have to ask the question:
why? Are they looking to put their own slant on your work and if so are
they in a position of expertise to do this? The chances are that most
have not thought about adding links or references to your work – they
may not appreciate that you, your organisation or funding body might be
interested in tracking it for impact. (Of course this leads to other
questions around whether you should be talking about your research in
the first place, but that is a conversation between you, your manager
and funder.) The only way to address this is to ensure that all
communications about your research with journalists, bloggers and media
organisations are on the caveat that they track back to your published
work and that this work has a unique, recognised identifier.
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| © LSE Impact Blog |
What can researchers do?
Any academic knows that to cite another’s
work in their own outputs they must cite it in the body text and add a
reference to the research pointing readers to this supporting work.
Students are taught this as being part and parcel of the process of
conducting research. So it should follow that anyone dealing with the
media should insist that their work is correctly cited and linked back
to once online. Not only does this linking aid interested members of the
general population find the research for themselves but also peers,
research groups and bodies as well as other journalists and people
working in the media.
You may not always be able to control how
your research is reported in the media and how the general public talk
about it, but you can do more to ensure readers get better access to the
actual research. In addition you can do more to ensure that media
coverage is picked up by altmetric platforms that will help build a
picture of where your research is being discussed. Working with the
media is a very valuable and rewarding opportunity to disseminate your
research to wider audiences. By adding the checks and balances with
links and references you ensure you get to see the long tail of
conversation that takes place afterwards. A conversation that you will
also be able to engage with and possibly benefit from.
Note: This article gives the views of
the author, and not the position of the LSE Impact Blog, nor of the
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