Beyond Citations: Measuring Idea-level Knowledge Diffusion from Research to Journalism and Policy-making

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel text-based method to measure how social science ideas spread from research to journalism and policy, revealing diverse diffusion patterns and semantic shifts over time.

Contribution

It develops an idea-level diffusion measurement approach that extends beyond citations, analyzing contextualized meanings across domains and over time.

Findings

Diffusion patterns vary significantly between ideas.

Research-policy domain distances are larger than research-journalism.

Ideas often shift roles from theory to practical application.

Abstract

Despite the importance of social science knowledge for various stakeholders, measuring its diffusion into different domains remains a challenge. This study uses a novel text-based approach to measure the idea-level diffusion of social science knowledge from the research domain to the journalism and policy-making domains. By doing so, we expand the detection of knowledge diffusion beyond the measurements of direct references. Our study focuses on media effects theories as key research ideas in the field of communication science. Using 72,703 documents (2000-2019) from three domains (i.e., research, journalism, and policy-making) that mention these ideas, we count the mentions of these ideas in each domain, estimate their domain-specific contexts, and track and compare differences across domains and over time. Overall, we find that diffusion patterns and dynamics vary considerably between ideas, with some ideas diffusing between other domains, while others do not. Based on the embedding regression approach, we compare contextualized meanings across domains and find that the distances between research and policy are typically larger than between research and journalism. We also find that ideas largely shift roles across domains - from being the theories themselves in research to sense-making in news to applied, administrative use in policy. Over time, we observe semantic convergence mainly for ideas that are practically oriented. Our results characterize the cross-domain diffusion patterns and dynamics of social science knowledge at the idea level, and we discuss the implications for measuring knowledge diffusion beyond citations.