A High-Scale Assessment of Social Media and Mainstream Media in Scientific Communication

TL;DR

This study compares social media and mainstream media coverage of scientific research, revealing that social media broadens and diversifies science communication, emphasizing impactful and novel research across diverse fields and institutions.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale analysis showing how social media changes the scope, diversity, and impact of scientific communication compared to traditional media.

Findings

Social media increases scientific coverage over eightfold.

Social media covers impactful and novel research.

Scientists highlight high-impact research and diverse institutions.

Abstract

Communication of scientific knowledge beyond the walls of science is key to science's societal impact. Media channels play sizable roles in disseminating new scientific ideas about human health, economic welfare, and government policy as well as responses to emergent challenges such as climate change. Indeed, effectively communicating science to the public helps inform society's decisions on scientific and technological policies, the value of science, and investment in research. At the same time, the rise of social media has greatly changed communication systems, which may substantially affect the public's interface with science. Examining 20.9 million scientific publications, we compare research coverage in social media and mainstream media in a broad corpus of scientific work. We find substantial shifts in the scale, impact, and heterogeneity of scientific coverage. First, social media significantly alters what science is, and is not, covered. Whereas mainstream media accentuates eminence in the coverage of science and focuses on specific fields, social media more evenly sample research according to field, institutional rank, journal, and demography, increasing the scale of scientific ideas covered relative to mainstream outlets more than eightfold. Second, despite concerns about the quality of science represented in social media, we find that social media typically covers scientific works that are impactful and novel within science. Third, scientists on social media, as experts in their domains, tend to surface high-impact research in their own fields while sampling widely across research institutions. Contrary to prevalent observations about social media, these findings reveal that social media expands and diversifies science reporting by highlighting high-impact research and bringing a broader array of scholars, institutions and scientific concepts into public view.