Still just Nature and Science? A longitudinal cross-country analysis of journalistic source selection in science news coverage

For many people, news media still are the most important source of information on science (e.g. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy 2020). The picture of science presented in these media is strongly influenced by the sources journalists use in their coverage. Numerous studies have shown a strong dependence of science journalism on a small number of prestigious science journals (Schäfer 2011). However, some authors have suggested that this low source diversity has changed over time due to the easier accessibility of research publications online (Kiernan 2016). The COVID-19 pandemic could also have influenced journalistic source preferences, leading to an increased use of new sources or an even stronger reliance on high impact medical journals. These potential changes have yet to be investigated for a larger sample of media titles. Additionally, most of the studies that have analysed source selection in science coverage are either limited to a small area of science or to a small number of media outlets in one country.

We try to address these research gaps in a large-scale analysis of print and online science coverage. ... mehrWe ask: 1) Are there country-specific differences in the journalistic selection of journals as sources? 2) Has the diversity of referenced journals increased over time? 3) Has the concentration of references decreased over time?

Based on a manual content analysis of 8.400 news articles, we have fine-tuned deep learning models for two purposes: to identify articles that cover a scientific result, and to extract all mentions of scientific journals in these articles. The combination of these models allowed us to analyse the entire coverage of about 30 news media titles each from Germany, the UK and the US in 2010, 2019 and 2020. Overall, we found more than 150.000 articles reporting on scientific results with about 40.000 references to journals.

In all analysed countries, there was a high degree of concentration of references on a small group of journals. While this group was very similar in all countries, we found a preference for journals from the same country, in US newspapers for example for Science or JAMA. Germany was notable for a less pronounced preference for medical journals. Over time, the number of distinct journals referenced has increased both in absolute terms and relative to the number of articles. However, this has not led to a less pronounced concentration of references. In all of the analysed years, about 80 % of all references are attributable to just 25 % of all journals. While there are some differences between 2019 and 2020 (e.g. a higher number of references to medical journals), the distribution of references barely changed with no decrease in the degree of concentration.

References:

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (2020): Public attitudes to science 2019. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/public-attitudes-to-science-2019.

Kiernan, Vincent (2016): Source diversity among journals cited in Science Times. In: Public Understanding of Science 25 (2), S. 198–206.

Schäfer, Mike S. (2011): Sources, characteristics and effects of mass media communication on science. In: Sociology Compass 5 (6), S. 399–412.