This could be the start of a beautiful relationship…

It’s no secret that even the best written papers can be a dull read, with the exciting parts often buried at the end of the article and little to show the non-expert reader which bit is worth reading, and why.

But as pressure mounts on researchers and universities to demonstrate the reach and impact of their work, it’s important to recognise that expert science and technology journalists can play an important role in decoding the science and in helping others to understand both what has happened and what the implications are.

Inevitably, people will be able to point out examples of exaggeration and misunderstanding in press reporting – a classic example is the scare about MMR vaccinations a few years ago that led to a drop in childhood immunisations and a rise in cases of the illnesses. However, there are many more good examples. The extensive coverage of 2012’s Higgs Boson research meant that most of the general population at least know that ‘something interesting happened at CERN’.

For researchers as well, reading magazine and web articles is an easy way to keep up to date with trends and developments in their subject area. A researcher who tried to read everything published wouldn’t have time to do any original research, but articles by specialist journalists provide a useful filter and a snapshot of the research landscape.

Meet the journalist

Scholarly publishers and journalists should be able to work together very easily. Science and technology journalists often have very similar backgrounds to journal editors and other journal-related jobs – science or engineering degrees, PhDs and often post-doctoral experience, too.

The desire for good grammar and scientific accuracy is common in both roles. Where journalists differ is in having to work to shorter timescales and consider different commercial pressures.

News of the World

Science and technology journalists aren’t the doorsteppers and phone hackers of popular imagination.

We have more reputable sources of information. Often, journalists start by looking at press releases. These can come from journal publishers, from universities, or both. Most journalists I have asked give the press release sources Alpha Galileo and EurekAlert as their main sources, in addition to press feeds from a few selected journals such as Science and Nature. Such press releases generally point back to the original paper and may include instructions about how to gain access to it.

Journal tables of contents are also useful for journalists to find out about new developments and discovery tools such as Google are great for finding contacts for an overview of a research area.

But however scientific papers are found, they tend to be used in two main ways. The first is to write a news story about a new piece of research. The fact that it’s new is the angle and we might interview the researchers for an update on what they are working on now and in the future.

The other way is as a source of contacts for researchers working in a certain area, so we can interview them about that research area. We’ll search keywords and look at the other research cited, often from the start point of a few interesting and related press releases.

There are other reliable sources of information, too. Conferences are a great place to gain insight into the latest hot topics and personal communication is another good way to get stories. Some of the journalists I spoke to for this article told me about researchers sending them copies of their papers directly – but remember that it’s better to do this straight away rather than wait a few months until the story is old news.

Depending on how applied the field is, patent applications are also a great source, particularly as so much is available freely online.

And then there is corporate news. This is useful, particularly for more applied research that is more likely to be patented and kept secret until nearing product launch.

It would also be foolish for a publication not to keep an eye on what their competitors are publishing. I tend to include following blogs in the same category and I read them in a similar way. This is also a way that lots of science stories published in specialist titles end up in the mainstream press – and then turn up again and again in different newspapers.

Limitations

While press releases are a good starting point for quick stories and ideas, they have to be used with caution. Those from journals tend to be fairly accurate on the topic of the paper, although they do (understandably) promote the journal. A press release that comes from a research institution or funder can have a bit more ‘spin’ to unravel.

For example, I received a press release a while ago stating that numbers of students studying a particular course had dropped by something like 42 per cent from 2002 to 2009. As the press release was dated 2011 the date range chosen was intriguing. Looking at the raw data published on student numbers it became clear why – the number had reached an all-time high in 2002 having been much lower in 2001, while the number for 2009 was quite a bit lower than the figure for 2010. The story was still interesting but not as sensational as the release suggested.

Of course research papers themselves aren’t immune to this type of spin. I read an abstract recently that proudly boasted that, since the 1970s, some quantity had risen from 'not much more than a third' to 'nearly 40 per cent'. The growth may well be interesting but its scale is misrepresented by the choice of language used.

Press releases are also not comprehensive. They only include the research that the writer has selected to share, which might mean some more relevant research is not included. Nonetheless, those journals that don’t send out press releases are missing out.

There is also sometimes a reluctance to share things with certain journalists. Some of this is related to access issues.

Access issues

Thanks to my role on Research Information I have good contacts with people in many big publishers and so could probably get access to an individual paper without huge problems. For a specialist journalist simply trying to negotiate online forms it can be a more lengthy process. Also, it’s not ideal that every bit of access negotiation has to happen separately and may not always result in a useful article.

I imagine this is even more of a problem for a generalist reporter on a daily newspaper.

There is also a risk of bias towards free stuff. I have found in the past that it was easier to find out about the latest research published in open-access journals from rival publishers than in the subscription titles published by my employer, and it’s clear that similar challenges of internal communication still sometimes apply.

Similarly, publications owned by universities or funding bodies can miss out on ground-breaking research coming out of their own employer. Sometimes this is even strategic: a belief by the organisation’s public relations department that their own colleagues are lower down the list of journalists to impress.

Interestingly, I think more than access to specific articles I’d value access to reliable discovery tools to find potentially useful papers in the first place.

Where in the world…?

Geography, time zones, language and culture represent further challenges.

As an English-speaking journalist, one of the easiest places to find research stories from is the USA. High research output, commonplace use of the internet, pro-active marketing teams and researchers who are happy to talk all make life easier.
Universities in Europe do not seem quite as good at routinely sending out press releases for interesting research published, or making researchers available for comment.

However, the UK comes above the rest of Europe in my list for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there’s the obvious issue of language. Secondly, there is simply the issue of my being here. The personal approach is often a winner and, more than once, I’ve found out about some interesting research simply by being in a pub with friends and getting talking to the researcher.

And here are the regions that are harder to find information from: Asia; Africa; South America; the Middle East; and Australia. Frustratingly, this is most of the world and it includes some very significant regions in terms of research output.

The reasons that they are tricky are diverse. Some countries have relatively small numbers of researchers and time zones also play a role. For someone in the UK, trying to speak to a researcher in Australia is a logistical challenge and interviews by email can take several days to complete.

In other cases, language and culture present bigger barriers. There’s no denying that anyone keeping an eye on global research needs to pay attention to what’s going on in China and Japan. But finding the initial research can be very hard – because of the language barrier and because there are fewer international press releases published in English. In addition, whereas a phone interview with a researcher in the USA might go on for half an hour to an hour and result straight away in lots of great quotes and insight for an article, an interview with a researcher in East Asia is likely to be via email and require several iterations before much information is exchanged – thanks, I believe, to a combination of language issues and cultural differences.

Media embargoes

Another issue with media access to scholarly papers is media embargoes. Providing information but requiring journalists to hold publication until a specific date can be useful, because it allows time to research and write a story properly. But it also complicates things. Trying to remember what I’m supposed to make live, and when, is another burden. There is the risk of forgetting.

TMI!

Information overload is a big issue. Trying to keep track of sources and have time to do interviews and write stories is increasingly a challenge, although it’s one that I would prefer to juggle myself, rather that having PR firms making the decisions about which journalist should get which story. After all, they don’t know everything that we are working on, or interested in.

Social media

One of the questions that is still unanswered is whether social media can help or hinder the process of dealing with information overload.

I find LinkedIn quite useful for keeping track of contacts, especially as people change jobs. And I’ve spent several months engaging more actively on Twitter as myself (in addition to tweeting as Research Information). I can’t say it’s made the information overload situation any better but it does give me more of a picture of what people are concerned about – and I’ve since commissioned several articles and lined up interviews following on from discussions and leads on Twitter.

As a tool for journalists I think it has huge limitations, though. It is hard to organise and the level of comment seems hugely outweighed by the numbers of retweets or links to other things. In addition, even for a journalist used to trying to say things in as few words as possible, the character count is too low.

In summary, researchers, journals and journalists need to work together. We need better communication and understanding, and to break down red tape for press access. My vision would be to have some sort of authenticated discovery and access tool especially for accredited journalists. That may be something that an existing discovery service could be involved in, or it may need a new company to come along. Such moves should help scholarly research developments to be reported more accurately and more often.