All the data and statistical models in the world won’t mean anything if we can’t communicate our findings with the outside world. Communication can take many forms and may need to address many different audiences

In academic settings, we most often think of a peer-reviewed journal article as the ultimate product of communication, but there are many intermediate and additional formats that even academic communication can take. Sharing drafts for feedback, giving presentations to gauge audience interest, and contributing to press coverage either through press releases from our institutions or by engaging with journalists are common mechanisms for making sure that our science reaches as many interested parties as possible. Each audience has different expectations and goals for what they want to gain from an understanding of scientific research, and each step along the way introduces new challenges for producing communication that is clear, correct, and interesting. Most scientists are never formally trained to write. We learn by doing and by responding to feedback, often from other academics, and do our best to adjust over time. And our incentives are absolutely to produce engaging content; articles and researchers are often judged on the number of citations they receive, a powerful reinforcement for producing titles and abstracts that attract as much attention as possible.

In science journalism, the reinforcer is often the number of page clicks generated (because of ad revenue). Although we may assume academics and journalists have similar goals (Truth) often the questions asked and the form of truth sought may differ substantially (for example: basic science questions like what? or how? versus applied questions like ‘how might this be used?’) and the audiences may be wildly different (other experts versus the general public). These different goals may lead to different aspects being emphasized or sometimes addressed versus unaddressed altogether. This is also a good place to note one major difference between academic and journalistic writing: in academic writing, we usually maintain close to total control of the version of the writing that is ultimately published; in journalism, it’s common for the editor to pick the title of the piece (rather than being up to the person whose byline appears underneath). Again, the goals of these parties may be wildly different - it’s not uncommon to see extremely clickbaity headlines on a perfectly reasonable piece of science journalism.

This week you’ll be reading a bit about the current state of public communication and knowledge about genetics, you’ll practice providing academic peer review using a template (the key here: review as you would like to be reviewed), and in our class meeting on Thursday we’ll generate some considerations to keep in mind whenever we endeavor to communicate science (whether to public or academic audiences). An important lesson from all of this is that the system is far from perfect at every stage: we rely on authors to report fully and clearly, we rely on peer reviewers to provide careful and constructive feedback (in the ‘real world’ they often do not; borderline abusive peer review is sadly not uncommon due to the anonymous nature of most peer review formats and is left to the editor handling the paper for the journal to ensure that unhelpful comments are intercepted), we rely on institutional press offices to produce accurate press releases, we rely on journalists to faithfully report results, other scientists to provide accurate and informative context, and editors not to seek page-clicks and controversy at the expense of accuracy. There’s a lot of places in the process where something can go wrong - either intentionally or unintentionally - and learning to critically evaluate the communication you’re presented with is a useful skill that we’re working to develop, not just this week but throughout the semester, to be able to apply more broadly outside the confines of this class.

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