Week 9 Science Communication

Constructive criticism and evaluation of writing, both scholarly and popular, is a skill that requires practice.

Objectives

Learn to identify common strengths and weaknesses in scholarly and popular science communication.
Practice providing academic journal-style peer review.

Lecture Notes

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 Zoom class chat 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 - in this case, me - 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.

As you work through the activities this week, keep in mind your next Course Project Milestone 3: Draft paper due at the end of Week 11. In particular, pay attention to what you see across various forms of science communication that you like, as well as what you don’t like, so that you can mimic (or avoid) those features in your own writing.

Prep Work

If you’re planning to attend this week’s Class Chat, we’ll be doing two in-class activities that you’ll need to take a few minutes before class to prepare for:
- Be ready to briefly describe one of the scholarly sources you completed an article summary template for Project Milestone 2. You may want to pull up the scholarly source and/or your summary as a reference to have on hand.
- Look back over one or more of your own or others’ posts comparing a popular source to a scholarly source (participation activities in Weeks 1, 5, 7, and 8). Be ready to discuss what you’ve seen that you like - and what you don’t like - in popular source coverage of science.

Participation Activities

Read & Discuss via Perusall: Chapman et al 2019 New literacy challenge for the twenty-first century- genetic knowledge is poor even among well educated. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12687-018-0363-7
Read & Discuss via Perusall: Morosoli et al 2020 Understanding science communication in human genetics using text mining. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.24.219683
Peer Review previously drafted Topic Summaries.
- Following the Peer Review template from the Resources tab, post a peer review for a previous week’s team project topic summary (for which you were NOT a team member).
- Peer review assignments will be posted in Moodle- you will only receive credit for peer-reviewing your assigned topic summaries.
- Each topic summary is posted to the Peer Review Forum as its own thread. Post your review as a reply to the existing thread.
- This activity can be completed up to 2 times, for 1 point per review.
Revise a Topic Summary
- Pick ONE Topic Summary that you were either a part of the team for in Weeks 5 and 7 OR that you were assigned as a Peer Review option this week AND that has received at least 2 peer reviews (so you have something to guide your edits).
- Using track-changes (so I can see what you’ve changed), revise the Topic Summary (adding details, smoothing language and structure, correcting grammar), and submit it in Moodle.
- Your final summary should be between 750 and 1000 words (not including references; about the length of a blog post) and include at least one image (such as a figure from a source or an eye-catching stock photo relevant to your topic; my favorite free stock photo source is Pixabay).
Class Chat, Thursday, 11:00 am - 12:20 pm (CT)
- We’ll be doing two in-class activities that you’ll need to take a few minutes before class to prepare for:
  - Be ready to briefly describe one of the scholarly sources you completed an article summary template for Project Milestone 2. You may want to pull up the scholarly source and/or your summary as a reference to have on hand.
  - Look back over one or more of your own or others’ posts comparing a popular source to a scholarly source (participation activities in Weeks 1, 5, 7, and 8). Be ready to discuss what you’ve seen that you like - and what you don’t like - in popular source coverage of science.