Medialising brain diseases: interactions between research and mass media. – MEDIANEURO

A combination of Altmetrics and Factiva databases has been used to build our database. These databases include scientific publications in the field of neurosciences and their corresponding press articles. We have collected publications from two time periods 2000-2004 and 2014-2018.

Our results show a correlation between the media attention and the selection operated by prestigious scientific journals. Indeed, we have shown that the peak of media attention regarding the Zika virus precede the increased selection of scientific publications about this virus in 3 journals, Nature, Science and Nature Medicine. Investigating the time frame of the publication process (i.e. the delays between submission and acceptance and between acceptance and online publication), we observed that both were highly reduced following the peak of media attention whereas this was not observed for other scientific studies published in the same journal issues, but on other topics.
We also analyzed the “publicity effect” previously described that is the link between media coverage and citations counts. We confirmed that studies reported in newspapers received on average more citations. We also showed that the citations’ advantage was more pronounced for lower impact factors (IF<10). There was also an “intensity effect”: among studies published in high impact factor journals (IF = 30), only those covered by at least 10 newspapers articles received a higher citation’ count.

These two correlations between media attention and scientific impact (temporal selection of scientific articles by editors and increased citation rates following press coverage) suggests an influence of media logics on science production and communication. If media trendiness prompts manuscript selection by the editors of leading biomedical journals and if media attention is sufficient to increase citation, it might be a cause for concern for the validity and legitimacy of the research process

Gonon, F., Dumas-Mallet, E, Ponnou, S. (2019) La couverture me´diatique des observations scientifiques concernant les troubles mentaux. Les cahiers du journalisme, 2(3) R045-R063
Dumas-Mallet, E., Garenne, A., Boraud, T., & Gonon, F. (2020). Does newspapers coverage influence the citations count of scientific publications? An analysis of biomedical studies. Scientometrics, doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03380-1.

This proposal picks up the concept of „medialisation of science“ that has been taken up more widely to describe the increasing role of mass media in current societal changes. It implies that scientists, research organisations and scientific publishers actively adapt to media logics and seek media coverage. It implies further that this orientation affects the research process and its outcome: scientific publications and expertise. Up to now, this concept has been mainly supported by case studies that are not suitable to determine how common such cases are. Therefore current approaches cannot provide systematic insights into the repercussions of media orientation of scientists on the core of scientific endeavour: the production of knowledge. This weakness is addressed by this project.
It will focus on five potential repercussions:
1. The increasing adaptation of media logics by prestigious scientific journals like Science or Nature that affects the selection of studies more and more.
2. The increase of exaggerations of scientific statements in press releases and scientific publications over time.
3. The boost of citation rates dependent upon the media attention.
4. The rising share of studies that are linked to already established public topics by journalism.
5. The increase of scientists with high reputation taking part in public discourses.

It is intended to research these potential repercussions by using a combination of Altmetrics, Lexis-Nexis and DowJones Factiva databases. We will constitute a large database enabling us to compare not only single cases or disciplines but neurosciences as a domain across two time periods: 2000-2004 and 2014-2018.
We intend to combine two different research branches, which are up to now almost completely unconnected. The first branch focuses on indicators relevant to distinguish different grades or shapes of medialisation. Studies belonging to this branch use extent, pluralisation and polarisation of a public discourse on science issues in mass media as indicators for medialisation, but do usually not integrate repercussions on science production into their design. The second branch consists of a few systematic studies mainly published recently in medical journals. They showed that biomedical findings are often misrepresented in press releases and that these misrepresentations spread in the media. These misrepresentations overstate the social interest of the scientific observations and might be interpreted as an indicator of medialisation.