1. We focus a lot on science communication as the generation of content.  However equally, and if not more, important is the filtering of content.  In the last few years, poorly informed, incorrect and out right maliciously wrong content has become prolific.  We need now, more than ever, for trusted domain experts to amplify, share, and provide reliable and accurate information. I saw this first hand reporting here at DSN with both the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and the Fukishama Reactors that bad information was rampant and people were looking for trusted content.

2. Somewhere we stopped teaching students and the public how to critically evaluate information. Or may be it never existed at all.  We need with renewed vigor to teach students and the public how to think, reason, and evaluate information.  We need mandatory classes and lessons across education levels in logic, philosophy, mathematics, statistics, problem solving, and scientific methodology.

3. We need to make sure good and correct information is more accessible and more viral than bad information.  We need to make it easier for students and the public to get the information they need to be an informed citizenry.

4. Science needs to be more open.  Open access publishing, science communication, and citizen science and other initiatives were good start of a larger “open” movement.  But now we need to swing the doors of science open a little wider.  We are not open or honest to our failures in the enterprise of science.  Metal health issues, inequality, profiteering, and harassment run rapid.  We need change and a river in Egypt isn’t the first step.

We need to be more open about our failures not just successes. @DrCraigMc giving a rallying cry rant I needed to hear and can get behind this morning. #nerdsoftrust

— KT (@vivalakt) June 25, 2018

5. We need to renew the social contract between educational institutions and the public.  We need to place value on an informed and educated citizenry.   This is the hallmark to economic prosperity and quality, political stability and growth, innovation in the sciences and humanities, and overall public health.  The renewal of this contract comes first and foremost with economic commitment from local to national levels and the foresight that this investment will be returned 10-fold.

6. Scientists need to all become nerds of trust. On Facebook, over beers at the bar, in your local and state government meetings, you need to be there with science.

@DrCraigMc of @deepseanews encourages us librarians to be “nerds of trust for friends & family” & use social media like Facebook to discuss science in our social spheres. @alaannual #alaac18 @ALA_ACRL #STS pic.twitter.com/8it9UtOV4m

— Michael R Leach (@mikeleach42) June 25, 2018

7. Science communication needs to be goal and mission oriented.  The idea of a “Field of Dreams” model of putting something out there and expecting it work is ridiculous.  If you have not thought about what success is and how you are going to measure it, stop now.  Science communication has to be deliberate in action.

“We need to stop half-assing our science outreach” and to think I almost meh’d out of this mornings session because sleep. >⁦@DrCraigMc⁩ https://t.co/5wOgz5bTEJ

— KT (@vivalakt) June 25, 2018

8. We need to break out of the echo chamber.  If you defriended all of your Facebook friends who had different political leanings to you, you are probably part of the problem.  Are your science communication efforts only reaching the NPR and PBS, science-enthusiast audience?  Was the last science and drink night you talked at just hipsters in tweed? Probably…  Are you still wondering why the public is struggling with science or just actively anti-science.  YOU ARE NOT TALKING TO THEM.  We need new and creative ways to reach new audiences especially those in lower socio-economic classes. We need to go to where they are and put science there.

9. We need to create and support places and times of innovation…places that domain experts in humanities, social science, education and pedagogy, science communication, and scientists learn from each other and build together.  These need to be places that applaud risk and go after moon shots while focused on action and products. Events like #oceandotcomm are one example.

10. Even if we don’t get anything else right, we need to get one thing right.  Be passionate.  This idea of science as cold, heartless, and stale enterprise needs to die.

“Be passionate. Science is not a cold place, it is an amazing place. Share that.” – @DrCraigMc in how we connect and excite the community in science efforts #alaac18

— Paige Dhyne (@LibandLife) June 25, 2018

The post 10 Things Science, Science Communication, and Just Maybe All of Academia Needs first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Liz Neeley and I discussed this in our 2014 paper.

In terms of social media outreach, or outreach in general, the impact on a scientist’s career remains largely unquantified and quite possibly indirect. “Many faculty members identified their primary job responsibilities as research and post-secondary teaching. They felt that outreach participation hindered their ability to fulfill those responsibilities and might be an ineffective use of their skills and time, and that it was not a valid use of their research funding”. In the survey by Ecklund et al., 31% of scientists felt that research university systems value research productivity, as indexed by grants and published papers, over everything else, including outreach. With this prioritization structure in place outreach may be perceived as unrelated to a scientist’s academic pursuits.

Perhaps because of both the ease of quantification and the impact is hypothesized to be direct, one specific question continues to generate considerable attention.   If a paper receives a significant number of social media mentions does it also receive a significant number of citations? If this correlation exist then this would support an argument that Tweeting, Facebooking, etc. about your scientific papers. This science communication would increase the exposure of your paper, including to scientists, eventually leading to more citations of that paper.  In this were true the impact of science communication would be direct and impact a metric that is used to evaluate scientists.

One of the largest studies on this topic, in analysis of 1.4 million documents published in PubMed and Web of Science published from 2010 to 2012, Haustein et al. found no correlation between a paper or a journals citation count and Twitter mentions.  However, multiple studies since do find a link between Tweets and citations rates including the papers of Peoples et al. and de Winter.

A new paper by Finch et al.  finds a link between social media mentions an citations also exists in the orthinology literature.  The authors set up the question nicely in the introduction

Weak positive correlations between social media mentions and future citations [5,8–10] suggest that online activity may anticipate or drive the traditional measure of scholarly ‘impact’. Online activity also promotes engagement with academic research, scholarly or otherwise, increasing article views and PDF downloads of PLoS ONE articles, for example [11,12]. Thus, altmetrics, and the online activity they represent, have the potential to complement, pre-empt and boost future citation rates, and are increasingly used by institutions and funders to measure the attention garnered by the research they support [13].

The findings? For a subset of 878 articles published in 2014, the group found that an increase in social media mentions, as indexed by the Altmetric Score, from 1 to 20 resulted in 112% increase in citation count from 2.6 to 5.5 citations per article.

So drop what you’re doing and start Tweeting about your most recent paper RIGHT NOW! 

But wait…

All of these studies show a correlation and not causation.  Simply put, scientific papers with a lot of social media mentions also have lots of citations.  One hypothesis would be that communicating your science broadly increases its exposure and increases the probability of citation.  And it appears that often those advocating for science communication repeat this narrative despite there currently being no support for this hypothesis.  Why is there no support?

Because the correlation between social media mentions and citations could be equally explained by other hypotheses.

So an equally likely explanation for this correlation is that papers that are popular garner both numerous social media mentions and eventually numerous citations.

Tom Webb also makes an outstanding point about the authors of such studies.

The authors of this most recent study note this overall causation and correlation dilemma as well.

Instead, our results suggest that altmetrics might provide an initial and immediate indicator of a research article’s future scholarly impact, particularly for articles published in more specialist journals…The correlative nature of this and other studies makes it difficult to establish any causal relationship between online activity and future citations

So what now?  First stop arguing, as many did on Twitter today (examples here), that Tweeting about your paper is good thing because it will ultimately generate more citations.  The jury is still out on this and will be until a study specifically is designed to test for the causation and not the correlation.

The post Will Tweeting About Your Research Paper Get You More Citations? Meh. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Gloop from gaby bastyra on Vimeo.

The post GLOOP. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Now lets schedule some Tweets! You can do this through Twitter but honestly Twitter does not make this easy. It requires multiple steps. I prefer using Tweetdeck. Clicking the Tweet composing button brings up an option for scheduling the Tweet.

Some other tools for scheduling Tweets are also available (see this post also).  I also really like Twuffer for its easy display and ease of use.

Choose a time a minute or so past the start of your talk for your first Tweet. You may opt to schedule them to start later if you feel the culture of the conference is for talks to start several minutes past time. Schedule Tweets to hit one per minute apart form each other. Protip: Make sure the computer in which you schedule your Tweets from is set to the same time zone as the conference. Yeah I’ve made this mistake…in the last week…at my latest conference.

Load your presentation to SlideShare (You can see my presentations here). The first Tweet you schedule should be a link your entire presentation. This will make it easy for people to find figures and statements they may miss. Protip: Alternatively, you can go with figshare, which will give your presentation a DOI that can then be cited in papers and other works.

What should you Tweet? Anything related to your talk. Definitely Tweet links to your papers if you are talking about the research within in them. I like to provide a link to a downloadable PDF. However, indicate the link is a PDF so others are not caught by surprise by a downloading file.

Also Tweet any images you want disseminated, main points, links to relevant papers, and figures. Also Tweet a thanks to coauthors and acknowledgements. Protip: Make sure to use their Twitter handles. They can RT and help promote the talk to their networks. Make sure to use the conference hashtag!  Yeah I’ve messed up this one by using the wrong hashtag. Another Protip: Bonus points if you make your own hashtag so people can see all of your schedule Tweets.

Protip: Do not schedule too many Tweets. You need to find a balance between getting relevant information out and overwhelming the conference hashtag. As a general rule, do not schedule more Tweets than slides in your presentation. For a 12-15 talk plan on 10 or so Tweets. For a longer talk 30-60 minutes, plan on no more than 20. Trust me it takes a bit of work to schedule Tweets. You will be burned out by 20 or so.

Now get Tweeting.

The post Become a Social Media Pro User: Tweeting Your Own Talk first appeared on Deep Sea News.

It was refreshing to hear a government official state her steadfast optimism, and urge scientists in the audience to adopt new tools and approaches. To prevent (and effectively cope with) climate change, the public needs to be engaged. This is a new world we live in. She highlighted the importance of social media in driving a scientific revolution.

After the talk I wanted to talk directly to Jane and ask her about social media and online tools. [Sidenote: Afterwards I had to find an empty room and do a little dance – SQUEEEE!] How can we use these most effectively? What should we be doing as scientists?

She basically had no idea. The online world is so new, so untested, and everyone is sitting in the dark. There are no agency initiatives yet poised to harness the power of the internet. She said scientists should use their personality. By default, this has to start with a bottom-up approach.

If that’s the case, how the hell are we going to pull this off?

Blogs and twitter can be the jumping off point, but changing the culture of ocean science has to be so much more than that.

If you love science–and you’re in a position to make a difference–let’s work together to be the marine Steve Jobs. Scientists are busy, but we will always make time for a cause we believe in. Those of us predisposed to communicate (the Deep-sea News Crew) recognize that we must lead our brethren.

Let’s stay positive, be quirky. Bring in the humor. As Kevin noted on his recent chat with Dr. Kiki, a doom-and-gloom message doesn’t motivate anyone. We shouldn’t potray scientists as old white guy authority figures telling you what to do. I’m not your mother. I’m your neighbor, your friend.

Let’s make scientific videos that go viral. Lets teach people about the science in their *homes* and *everyday lives*. Hydrothermal vents are definitely awesome, your average Joe doesn’t run into tube worms on his commute to work. Let’s make people stakeholders in their local communities–their beaches, their coasts, their salt marshes.

I’m begging you: scientists can’t do this alone. The best science results from collaboration, and the best science communication must follow suit.

To impact society, we must connect some very distant dots. We must bring together scientists, writers, editors, techies, entrepreneurs…the list goes on. At Deep-sea News we’re desperate get everyone thinking about the oceans, but we’re also limited by time and resources. We need help from the right connections. It needs to start NOW. This one’s a game changer.

The post Jane Lubchenco’s message to scientists first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post The Biodiverse Universe first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Faced with such a question, I did what any studious scientist does: I went to the literature.  I did this simply because am not an expert on the current state of the social science of ocean literacy, which seems rather important if you’re planning a strategy aimed at improving it!  In other words, to work out how to get where we want to go, we need to know where we are.  In doing this search I was especially helped by a paper by Brent Steel and his colleagues from Oregon State University: “Public ocean literacy in the United States” (Ocean and Coastal Management 48: 97-114).  It paints a picture even more disappointing than I expected.  In their survey of 1,200 Americans, just 4% of folks assessed themselves as being well informed about ocean and coastal issues, whereas over a third considered themselves totally uninformed (this disparity was even greater in non-coastal states).  I was pleasantly surprised to read that 75% of respondents were familiar with the term “Marine Protected Area”, but disappointed that only just over half knew the term “Biodiversity”, which, after all, is what MPAs seek to protect!  About a third of people understood that El Nino affects ocean currents, while less than 30% understood the term “by-catch” in relation to fisheries.  I could go on.  Interestingly, Steel et al. went on to analyse the sources of knowledge that people use for ocean issues.  The use of newspapers and the internet (you go, ocean bloggers!) as information sources was positively correlated with ocean literacy, whereas TV and (to a lesser degree) radio were negatively correlated.  Armed with rigorous confirmation of the poor state of ocean literacy and some ideas about which media modes may/may not be helping, we can go on to think about ways we might help improve the situation.  I came up with 5 steps or ideas to start with, but I’d love to hear more ideas from readers in the comments section.

It might surprise some people that I would start with improving ocean literacy in scientists, not the public.  How does that work?  Aren’t scientists supposed to be the ones with all the knowledge?  Well, yes, but I’m pretty sure that if you ask most marine scientists (and scientists in general) they’ll tell you that science is an exercise in embracing individual and collective ignorance; scientists are just incrementally less ignorant of the world’s workings than everyone else!  Thankfully, improving ocean literacy for scientists is relatively easy; by virtue of their skillset, scientists are pretty good at assimilating and integrating new knowledge.  But there’s still one big hurdle to get over and that is access to that knowledge.  I enter into evidence the following anecdote.  Every day I get emails from scientists that go something like this “Dear esteemed colleague, I am <insert name here>, postdoctoral scholar from <insert developing nation here>.  Please send me a copy of your paper <insert latest earth-shattering Dove et al. effort here>.  Also, I have not the library access, so in addition please to be sending me all papers you have relevant to this topic also as well.”  There are good, earnest and hard-working scientists all over the world that are hamstrung because they just can’t get access to even the most mainstream literature.  If you think I’m picking on developing nations, think again.  In doing the search described above for “public AND ocean AND literacy”, I tagged 9 abstracts in a search of Web of Science, one of the major abstracting journals that gathers summaries of scientific literature into a conveniently searchable database.  When I sought the full papers, however, I could only get 4 out of 9, even using 2 different major university library logins.  In other words, the majority of relevant literature in this case may as well not exist, since it was inaccessible to me, blessed though I am by location and vocation.  Yes, it seems that improving ocean literacy for scientists is another case where the open access publishing revolution offers hope for real improvement.  It’s not the be all and end all of course (the financially-challenged, developing-world scholar can no more afford to publish in many OA journals than to subscribe to the traditional ones!), but it’s a huge step in the right direction.   To improve ocean literacy, therefore, I say Step 1 is – improve access for SCIENTISTS.  Of course, open access would make the very same information available to the public as well, which is even better!

Step 2 on the path to improved ocean literacy is a simple problem with an equally simple solution, one whose simplicity is matched only by many scientist’s resistance to embracing it.  It concerns ocean literacy very literally, but not literacy in the definition “familiarity with concepts”, rather, literacy as “ability to read and write”.  How can we expect the public to become familiar with the concepts if they can’t speak the language?  And therein lies the rub: marine scientists spend years of tertiary training and subsequent on-the-job experience learning, assimilating, indeed inventing, an entire language that describes the content of their research.  It’s not malicious – all expert fields, scientific and otherwise, do exactly the same thing to abbreviate complex concepts and give names to unique entities and processes encountered only in that field – but it does present something of an obstacle to effective communication.  The cold hard fact is that the public cannot and will not (and I argue should not have to) meet the scientific community half-way when it comes to communicating scientific concepts, and that puts the onus on scientists to use language more effectively when communicating about science.  I meet a lot of bright young scientists and students who rail against this idea.  “No!” they say, “Why should I do all the work?  The public needs to make an effort!”.  No, they don’t.  They won’t.  They just don’t care, and that won’t change until you tell them that the oceans are something to care about, and do it in a way that they understand.  So, my step 2 is – Scientists must use the language that we ALL possess, not the one only scientists possess.  Why do scientists not do this more often, anyway?  I think the answer to that may prove surprisingly complex, but here’s a couple of reasons I can think of right off the bat.  (1) It’s a pain in the arse; it’s hard to remember which words or usages others may or may not be familiar with.  To remedy that, I often suggest that people just try explaining it as if they were talking to their grandma: simply and respectfully. To succeed in communication, it is essential that scientists not lapse into jargon, nor give into condescending speech, which is easy to do if you’re oversimplifying.  I often find, though, that its not the complexity of the concepts that is the problem, anyway, so simplifying them is not the solution.  The real problem is that the audience is simply not familiar with the words you’re using, so they are denied the opportunity to understand the concept in the first place. In other words, its the style not the substance, stupid!  (2) The language is part of the scientist’s identity and so ingrained that it can be really hard to unlearn it for the purposes of sharing with others.  For some marine scientists, explaining the subtleties of Ekman transport, thermohaline circulation or bioturbation could be as disconcerting and challenging as a sighted person trying to explain “red” to someone blind from birth.  Of course, this problem of language awareness isn’t a new idea in science communication.  Most recently, Andrew Thaler at Southern Fried Science started a thought-provoking thread about words that mean something different in science than in regular use, and Carl Zimmer’s list of banned words has become essential reading for scientific communicators everywhere.  We at DSN and in the broader science community need to keep the ball rolling and remember at all times that the onus is on scientists to reach across the linguistic divide to engage the public.  One great way to do that: reverent irreverence (see? The core values tie together. Total package…)

My third step is all about who drives the approach we take to communication, scientists or non-scientists; in that sense, it’s probably also tied to the previous step.  There are lots of amazing things to see and learn about life in the oceans, and pretty early on the storytellers of society picked the low-hanging fruit.  These included animals like dolphins, whales, seals, otters and penguins; the animals that scientists label “charismatic megafauna” (a term that has come to have a somewhat derisive stigma in scientific circles!).   As a result of this process, a disturbing proportion of non-science folks think marine biology is all about Flipper and Salty, when of course those animals make up a vanishingly tiny portion of the diversity and abundance of marine life.  Rather than move on to tell the stories of other (IMO more interesting) animal groups, however, many uninformed/unmotivated producers of mass media have continued to hammer these species as being somehow iconic of “all things ocean”.  In doing so, the storytellers of society have often embraced stereotypes and trite oversimplification in order to give the people what they think the public wants; perhaps this is why Steel et al. found a negative correlation of TV with ocean literacy.  Regardless, I call this the Detroit approach.  When the US auto industry tried to give people what they thought we wanted during the SUV craze of the early Naughties – each trying to outdo the other with greater excess – we ended up with the Hummer H2 and so many other similarly ridiculous and irresponsible vehicles, and it drove the industry to the collapse.  No, Step 3 to improve ocean literacy is that scientists need to drive the storytelling more, using the Steve Jobs approach and not the Detroit approach.  The public didn’t know we wanted iPhones/iPods/iPads until Jobs told us we did through excellence in design and marketing.  If we want to achieve meaningful improvement in public ocean literacy, we need to stop pandering to what people think the ocean is about by, for example, not taking the easy route offered by the charismatic megafauna.  Instead, we as scientists need to take charge of the conversation and work with the storytellers to find intriguing, inspiring, exciting and entertaining ways to tell the public why the rest of the ocean is just so incredible, so cool and so critical to our collective survival.  Will it be easy? Not always, but I’m pretty sure the folks at Apple worked their tails off too.  We would all do well to follow the lead of the BBC documentary team in this respect, and to foster the development of new charismatic scientist celebrities (can you say Cousteau?) to help tell the stories.  This all seems to me especially important in light of the findings of Steel et al. that TV is negatively correlated with ocean literacy.  Whether that correlation represents cause or effect is not yet clear, but certainly there appears to be a lot of work to do to improve mass media as sources of ocean knowledge for the public.  At DSN we are in the gifted position of controlling our own media “channel”, however modest, so you can bet we won’t shy away from a good story, however challenging, about some less fuzzy but no less amazing aspect of marine biology.

Step 4 – Improve experiential learning options.  Learning is a funny old thing, and everybody does it differently.  Some folks can learn just from lectures (hearing), while some folks can remember everything from a book they read or a documentary they watched (seeing).  I, on the other hand, am an experiential learner: one who learns by doing.  I swear I learned more in one 2-week marine biology field course in 1993 than I did in the rest of that year’s university lecture courses put together.  The previous points I’ve addressed in this essay only really address the first two types of learning, though, the listeners and the watchers, so what do we do for the experiential learners?  How do we bring marine science to a largely land-based public in a genuinely hands-on way?  Well, there are actually lots of ways, just ask the National Marine Educators Association.  Here’s just two: Public Aquariums and Citizen Science Projects.

One of the best ways people can experience the ocean without setting sail themselves is by visiting their local public aquarium.  Most of the biggest and best of these are driven by multi-pronged missions that integrate entertainment with educational and conservation/research goals (if you’re not sure about your local aquarium, just ask if they are members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, it’s A Good Sign).  It’s a case of come for the fun, stay for the learnin’!   Their complex societal role puts a significant responsibility on aquariums to develop exhibit and program materials that will successfully engage the visiting public in marine issues.  As an industry insider, I can tell you that this is something the husbandry, conservation, research and education staff of all aquariums take very seriously.  So get out there and see what they’ve got going on: go to your local aquarium (or a zoo, a museum, a science center), touch an animal, enroll your kids in a camp, go to an aquarium sleepover.  In other words, get involved.  In most cases your attendance dollars will go to support a non-profit institution that can act as a key conduit for you and your family to experience hands-on the oceans that we all love.

The other way to improve ocean literacy for the experiential learning public is through Citizen Science projects.  That is, projects that aim to gather scientific data using the freely-offered help of the tax-paying public that so often supports our work.  Citizen Science is definitely a buzz word in science education and outreach and many column inches and blog screens have been devoted to this topic.  I’m no expert but I think I can safely summarise by saying that Citizen Science is admirable in principle, but hard to do well.  There are lots of them out there, but few marine ones have succeeded in engaging the public at any mass level (compared to, say, the SETI at Home program, for example).  Why aren’t there more?  Probably because they are not always appropriate to the topic at hand (e.g. how many average folks visit hydrothermal vents at bone-crushing depths, hundreds of miles from shore?), they can be more difficult to execute/administer than traditional data gathering projects, and also because scientists often have concerns about data quality when the information isn’t gathered by qualified scientists, or the grad or undergrad students under their direct supervision.  If you’re a scientist, consider a Citizen Science element for your next proposal, and if you’re not, look for one in which you, your kids or your school can participate.  Does DSN have a role in experiential learning or are we “just” a blog.  Well, we have some ideas bouncing around the collective noodle, so watch this space…

At the risk of losing readers who may be suffering from climate change fatigue, I will finish briefly with Step 5 – help the public understand that global warming is first and foremost an ocean problem, not an atmosphere problem.  Climate change is a topic that has received a lot of attention on this blog and countless others, and rightly so; it is the single greatest threat to the future  diversity of life on this planet.  Despite all the talk, there’s still a tragically huge amount of climate change denial going on (we’ve written about that too) and we can’t afford to allow that voice, unscientific as it is, to overwhelm the voice of reason, rigorous data and, let’s face it, reality.  We will continue to cover the importance of climate change phenomena as expressed in the sea, whenever important news develops in the field.  That will include warming but also ocean acidification, which is one topic of which the wider public remains sadly illiterate.

One of the best ways I think we can help promote ocean literacy is simply to be true to ourselves.  We, the DSN bloggers, but really all marine scientists, science online folks, science communicators, science journalists, all of us, need to get excited and to share that with the public.  As Holly Bik has said, we do need to cast aside the stereotype of the scientist as austere, bookish, lab-coated egg heads interested only in  publications and personal impact factors.  Instead, we need to embrace our own individuality, personality and passion for nature, then infect others with our enthusiasm for the cool things we’ve learned about the oceans and – even more importantly – for all the awesome unknown stuff left to learn.  We’re all faced right now with a fantastic opportunity to reinvent science itself (open access etc.) and its relationship with the people who so often pay for it (citizen science etc.).  In addition, we’re living at a time when newer and better technological tools are becoming available every day (social media etc.), tools that can help us make the most of these opportunities for the betterment of science and society.  It’s a great time to be a marine scientist and a scientist communicator and we at DSN are looking forward to playing a part.  I, for one, am psyched.

The post Promoting Ocean Literacy – a DSN Core Value first appeared on Deep Sea News.

THE SCIENTIST

The scientist is usually found in office, field, or lab. The scientist’s social rank depends primarily on his or her scientific publications, which may or may not be of interest to the general public (an entirely different animal far beyond the scope of this guide). Scientists often deal with words with very specific meanings, probabilities, and concepts unfamiliar to the non-scientist, and after many years of absorption in these concepts may find it difficult that non-scientists do not understand these things. One of the most dangerous habits of scientists is to use normal-sounding words in peculiar and non-intuitive ways. Most scientists do not realize they do these things and think that they sound completely normal. The typical scientist is too busy doing science (and gathering resources to do science) to spend significant time or energy improving their public communication skills, however they may value it in theory.

Because of this, many scientists actively avoid the company of journalists. They or their colleagues may have experienced predatory or parasitic journalistic behavior in the past, or perceive standard journalistic behavior (such as an undue interest in squid) as rather crass. Most scientists are not familiar with journalists and may misinterpret standard journalistic practice (e.g., not allowing scientists to read unpublished copy, not being familiar with the scientist’s specific area of expertise) as inappropriate. While it is possible for some scientists to increase his/her social rank among the public by talking to journalists, these scientists are frequently cast out by the larger scientific group, and their social rank among scientists diminished. This is particularly true when the tribe perceives that the scientist has overstepped the facts (that the scientist may have fallen prey to a predatory journalist may not be considered) or perceives that the issue at hand is not scientifically interesting (even if it is interesting to the public).

Journalists wishing to win the trust of scientists must use particular caution regarding factual statements. Scientists may not understand how to present information to the public in an understandable and engaging way, but scientists deal in facts, and are extremely sensitive about inaccurate or misleading statements. Paraphrasing scientific findings can be fraught with particular peril, as a sentence that sounds completely reasonable to the journalist may actually be incorrect, thereby causing the scientist to aggressively defend their territory or to flee.

This guide recommends that journalists engage in the common practice of fact-checking, as is practiced at major publications such as the New Yorker, and to consider sending paraphrased sections of their writing to scientists to be checked for accuracy. I realize that journalists must move swiftly across the plains of publication to avoid being overcome by competitors, but accuracy is paramount to a good relationship with scientists. Remember that bad scientists (e.g., Andrew Wakefield) are overrepresented in the press, and that this makes good scientists skittish. One bad journalistic experience may make a scientist wary for the next twenty or thirty years.

THE JOURNALIST

The journalist is a cosmopolitan species, but is under intense threat in many locales due to habitat destruction. The most intact remaining journalistic habitats are a few major metropolitan areas and the Internet – other locales may host journalists who are forced to consume all topics, not just science, in order to survive. This places severe stress upon the journalist, who must produce a certain amount of copy for the tribe by strict deadlines, or risk being thrown out of the tribe altogether. Usually only journalists of very high rank are allowed to consume a diet of strictly science.

Because of this, journalists who seek the company of scientists are usually not specialists. They will not necessarily know about scientists’ area of research, even about topics that scientists consider utterly fundamental. When writing for the public journalists will not be able to use the very specific language utilized by scientists, include every caveat or probability, or avoid questions that the public is interested in, even if the scientist thinks those are stupid questions and the public should know better. Journalists tell stories that are interesting to their readers – this means they are neither scientists’ friends nor enemies.

Scientists wishing to talk to journalists are encouraged to do so, as the survival of much scientific work depends on the public funds. Scientists should practice talking about their work to the domesticated journalists present in many universities (Public Relations Officers), who can help craft understandable and accurate messages to prepare for contact with free-range journalists in the wild. Scientists should try to anticipate what the journalist might ask and think about how they might answer these questions (even if they think they are stupid). If the facts in the published story are wrong, scientists should ask for corrections – paper newspapers will be lining birdcages a day or two after publication, but stories on the Internet are forever. If a journalist produces an article with which the scientist is pleased, the scientist should consider giving that journalist a call the next time something interesting happens.

CAUTIONARY NOTE

A full description of the complex ecosystem inhabited by journalists and scientists is far beyond the scope of this short guide. Of necessity, these observations are generalizations and I caution you not to take them too literally when trying to understand a specific individual scientist or journalist. For example, high-ranking individuals of each species may behave very differently than low-ranking individuals. To make matters yet more complicated, scientist-journalist hybrids are not uncommon in the wild, particularly on the Internet.

To become more familiar with the habits of these species, I encourage you to read the recent discussion on fact-checking and copy-checking in science journalism.

When do you [journalists] fact-check article content with sources?

How do scientists view fact-checking by science writers?

Getting on the same page with science journalists, from our own para_sight

I highly recommend this excellent piece from the Biology Files which nicely explains and summarizes this whole debate.

UPDATE: David Kroll recaps the whole debate – if you have no idea what I’m talking about or why I wrote this, read his post first.

The post Scientists vs. Journalists: A Field Guide first appeared on Deep Sea News.

<whistles>

Done?  OK, so in essence, Bhattacharya’s argument seems to be that it’s OK for scientists to check their quotes intended for an article about their work to make sure they were accurately reproduced, but they have no copy check rights beyond that.  My specific issue is that he’s asking scientists to take a leap of faith that between their quote to the journalist and the news stand, the journalist will not distort, misrepresent or otherwise change the meaning of what was said by way of the surrounding copy.  The problem is, by then it’s too late to do anything about it.  I am just one of the many scientists who at one point or another have been burned by a case of misrepresentation in the press.  But it’s not like Bhattacharya is saying “its OK, trust us, we’ll get it right”, he seems to be saying “never you mind what we do with your quote, that’s our business”. 

“Reporters will give the story an angle that has their reader firmly in mind. The reader is not a scientist’s first concern. “

I read this to mean that the journalist writes for the reader, and is entitled to change the way the material is presented to do so. the phrase “give the story an angle” specifically implies that objectivity may be trumped by a context that may be more appealing to the reader; in other words, style over substance.  This idea is anathema to a scientific community that has a hard enough time explaining the arcane nature of their work, without the issue being clouded by somebody else’s “angle”.  I also object to the idea that the reader is not the scientist’s first concern.  If that were the case, we wouldn’t care what you did with our quotes!  Its precisely because we care what the reader thinks that we go to such efforts to ensure that our work is properly represented.  He goes on:

“As a result, researchers can often suggest changes that would flatten the tone, or introduce caveats and detail that would only matter to another specialist in their own field of research.”

Flatten the tone?  That sounds to me like a scientist reining in sensationalistic writing.  As for introducing ceveats and details, that’s where the proverbial devil lives much of the time.  What might seem like a tiny sin of omission to a journalist might be a really big deal to a scientist.  The worst the journalist could be accused of is hyperbole, whereas the scientist might find themselves in hot water or an argument over priority or authority in the science community.  Just look how easily harmless scientific words were twisted (albeit with polotical motives) during the climate-gate email scandal.

Which brings me to the Twitter conversation.  I chimed in after the omnipresent Bora Zivcovik retweeted Martin Robbins’ (also of the Guardian) tweet regarding the story (@Ananyo is Bhattacharya ):

My comment http://lay.si/ke RT @Ananyo: Scientists should not be allowed to copy-check stories about their work http://lay.si/kd

I replied:

What a poor argument. “Flatten the tone” = “reduce sensationalism” & “Introduce details” = “ensure accuracy”! @mjrobbins @Ananyo @BoraZ

Bhattacharya :

@para_sight problem is you guys are not good judges of readability.  and then @para_sight and to be fair, why shld u be? It’s not your job.

Me:

@Ananyo What use readbility without factual accuracy? and then  @Ananyo Aside from which, your statement about judging readability is a mildly insulting gross generalisation

Skipping forward a bit, he says:

@para_sight it’s not about communicating the details of scientist x’s research. our objective is different.

which really raised my eyebrows:

@Ananyo Did I just read you right that a science journalists job is NOT communicating scienctists research??

and he replies:

YES YOU DID RT @para_sight: @Ananyo Did I just read you right that a science journalists job is NOT communicating scienctists research??

@para_sight guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2… here’s what o think it’s for

So I go check out this other piece to see if I can better understand where he’s coming from.  It’s not exactly on point with the conversation, seemingly being more directed at fellow journalists with respect to the Bristish science writing awards, but towards the end it gets better, and I’m still confused:

“Now, we all love Brian Cox and a certain amount of good science journalism might be cheerleading for the fascinating or baffling work of scientists. But I believe the best stories, and those that are often poorly represented in the ABSW awards, come from the troubled hinterland where science meets politics and big business”

It sounds like he draws a fairly bright line between communicating the contents of new scientific research to the public and a sort of “real journalism”: looking for conflict or drama where science butts up against other spheres of endeavour (interesting that religion was left out).  And here’s where we get to the differing perceptions of scientists and journalists, because I’m pretty sure if you ask most scientists what science journalism is for they’ll say it’s to translate the difficult science they do for the eyes and minds of the public through a skilled journalist’s mastery of language and writing.

 Not surprisingly, Robbins takes Bhattacharya side:

@Ananyo @para_sight Communicating scientists’ research isn’t journalism, it’s PR.

OK, that’s another view point I can’t agree with.  Science communication should be agnostic about all things except enthusiasm.  PR is lots of things, some of them are even good, but agnostic it ain’t!

Ed Yong, whom I respect tremendously, is closer to the middle ground:

@para_sight @Ananyo is right. Sci journalism and sci-comms are different. Overlapping but different.  After I then said that Bhattacharya and I were on different planets, he replied:  @Ananyo @para_sight You’re only on diff planets in that one of you is focusing on good journos/bad scientists; the other on the opposite.

He’s probably right, but even so it means that the perception gulf exists nonetheless.  In that case, perhaps rather than worrying about whether or not scientists should have rights to check articles before they get published, we should focus our energies on a better mutual understanding between scientists and journalists about what our respective goals are, because that’s a much more worrisome and potential damaging problem.  Bhattacharya and I agree on at least one thing, so I’ll give him the last word on that:

@para_sight journalists are from venus, scientists are from mars? but you’re right. journalism or news writing is not a simple affair….

The post Getting on the same page with Science Journalists first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Its a bit of a circular title, but I think it is honest. Marine scientists are constantly shouting at walls of reporters and news consumers that everything is fucked (pardon my french, but its not untrue). And well, it sort of is. But how do we explain without being too overly alarmist? I get concerned when I read comments on news pieces and popular science articles or blog that follow along the lines of this one I saw on this Sign On San Diego article: Marine scientists focus on sardines, squid and other forage fish.

“These “scientists ” earn a living on fear .. they must keep fear going to continue to be paid ..  as long as there is fear, there willl be groups to further fund the research into this fear ..  and it is all a money game .. corruption, plain and simple ..”

The article discusses a push in California legislature to make “… state fishery managers account for the needs of marine predators when determining how much forage fish can be caught.” It is unclear how this will be done but the language of these regulations are typically along the lines of best available science. I could focus on the science – of which I do not know in great detail, though I’ve always supported an ecosystem approach to management – but I think this offers a chance to discuss some of the communications issues that impede conservation.

Most of the time we shrug off ridiculously negative online comments. Just someone gone trolling, someone has an agenda or general internet asshatery. But comments are the window into the soul of the populace (to some extent). Online, people can assume any persona they wish. Just go onto any popular youtube video and scroll down the comment list. It can be a dark, scary place.

Comments on conservation articles can be just as daunting. You typically get the extremes: overly supportive or bitter and vile. It takes a special kind of person to comment on online material. For positive commenters, you may want to throw your “like” in the ring or participate in constructive conversation. Most people don’t comment, and that is fine. Many (including myself) enjoy passively consuming news and opinion of a variety of types. From our Spring DSN Reader Survey, most of you do not comment here on DSN, but still enjoy our content and visit us often. The reasons were typically 1) didn’t feel qualified to comment (though over half of respondents carried graduate degrees), 2) generally never comment on blogs, and 3) feels like they never have anything else to add.

Negative commenters though, oh boy! They are someone special. I want to draw the line in the sand right off the boat that correcting typos, grammar and the like is not negative commenting, neither necessarily is contrarianism or skepticism of a post’s content. All of these are, or can be, constructive criticisms. We certainly welcome that! Negative commenting is spiteful, intentionally hurtful, not constructive and generally all around a bad, pointless idea. Nonetheless, all too common – more so on news sites or mainstream media than on blogs. One of the reasons I think this might be is that blogs, even small blogs, tend to generate or be integrated into communities where bad behavior is less tolerated. Bloggers can set their own rules for engagement however they want and may change everything on a whim if they so choose to. There is no higher power to answer to. Whereas mainstream media has, arguably, few built in filters – made trickier with all the social media commenting plugins – and the volume of comments makes it unpractical to police an article well. There are, of course, exceptions.

But comments are very insightful because someone took the time and felt the need to say something. We can use the negativity and turn it around and ask ourselves how can we dampen this type of response? In science communication, we need a little more of what I like to call preemptive communication. This means that we need to predict what is going to be offend or be wrong with what we are going to say in the future. Surely, a very hard, if not impossible, task. To circumvent this paradox, one needs to merely study the errors of previous communication efforts (including your own). Easier said than done I know! But think about it. You see a douchey negative comment online, what is your response? 1) Glance over or ignore it, 2) read it and chuckle and their ignorance, 3) read it and facepalm at their stupidity, 4) read it and respond with logic, 5) read it and respond with negativity, or 6) do you even bother reading comments at all?

I believe comments have intrinsic value to those of us honing our communications skills – which really should be all of us in the sciences. The National Science Foundation (NSF), a major source of government research funding in the U.S., goes as far as to require grantees to discuss how they will make their research – and more generally, science – broadly accessible. These “broader impacts” are sometimes glossed over, but the devil will come for his toll as the public support for basic research fades along with government funding. The situation is getting more dire such that NSF recently has proposed that grantees now justify how their broader impact statements will fit within the framework of national socioeconomic goals. As Daniel Sarewitz is quoted, “Assessments of the wider value of research are unpopular. Proposed changes will only produce more hype and hypocrisy.”

Furthermore, the national socioeconomic goals skirt around protecting the environment. So conservation science communicators are already facing an uphill battle. Messaging needs to anticipate an anti-science or ambivalent-science reception. Wading through oppositional talking points, dissecting dissension from vitriol, and circling around to preemptively attack these views is an unpleasant yet necessary task. Negative commenters live for the “gotcha” moment. The less we can give them, the more effectively we can keep on task. Of course, you can argue they will always find something to gripe at or just throw out their arms and claim conservationists have a hidden agenda and just make stuff up. That will never go away unfortunately. But maintaining a positive message, anticipating criticisms and keeping your head cool ca’t surely hurt.

I don’t know if these ideas are useful, but I do know we need to think outside of the box when it comes to communicating the needs for conservation. What I often see is dismissal based on misunderstanding, misinterpretation or outright agenda. We can’t take the high road and speak above people, dismissing them back. Its not useful and our common goals should include reaching out to new audiences. Something is working, if you poll people, anecdotally they support conservation and clean environment, but it doesn’t appear to be maintained through to any meaningful activism. Part of the goal of conservation communication is to convert, but a large part is also to push the fence sitters over the edge into action of some kind. Using negative comments as a lens into improving our communication efforts may just be one more thing we can do give some of those pushes, but at least to anticipate criticisms that may put off some of the passerby’s.

The post Preemptive Conservation Communication Through the Lens of Negative Comments first appeared on Deep Sea News.