When one Chinese national recently petitioned the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to become a permanent resident, he thought his chances were pretty good. As an accomplished biologist, he figured that news articles in top media outlets, including The New York Times, covering his research would demonstrate his "extraordinary ability" in the sciences, as called for by the EB-1A visa.
But when the immigration officers rejected his petition, they noted that his name did not appear anywhere in the news articles. News coverage of a paper he co-authored did not directly demonstrate his major contribution to the work.
As this biologist's close friend, I felt bad for him because I knew how much he had dedicated to the project. He even started the idea as one of his Ph.D. dissertation chapters. But as a scientist who studies topics related to scientific innovation, I understand the immigration officers' perspective: Research is increasingly done through teamwork, so it's hard to know individual contributions if a news article reports only the study findings.
This anecdote made me and my colleagues Misha Teplitskiy and David Jurgens curious about what affects journalists' decisions about which researchers to feature in their news stories.
There's a lot at stake for a scientist whose name is or isn't mentioned in journalistic coverage of their work. News media play a key role in disseminating new scientific findings to the public. The coverage of a particular study brings prestige to its research team and their institutions. The depth and quality of coverage then shapes public perception of who is doing good science. In some cases, as my friend's story suggests, the coverage can affect individual careers.
Do scientists' social identities, such as ethnicity or race, play a role in who gets named?
This question is not straightforward to answer. On the one hand, racial bias may exist, given the profound underrepresentation of minorities in U.S. mainstream media. On the other, science journalism is known for its high standard of objective reporting. We decided to investigate this question in a systematic fashion using large-scale observational data.
The least coverage? Chinese and African names
My colleagues and I analyzed 223,587 news stories from 288 U.S. media outlets, sourced from Altmetric.com, a website that monitors online posts about research papers. The news stories, published from 2011-2019, covered 100,486 scientific papers. For each paper, we focused on authors with the highest chance of being mentioned: the first author, last author and other designated corresponding authors. We calculated how often the authors were mentioned in the news articles reporting their research.
We used an algorithm to infer perceived ethnicity from authors' names. We figured that journalists may rely on such cues in the absence of scientists' self-reported information. We considered authors with Anglo names – like John Brown or Emily Taylor – as the majority group and then compared the average mention rates across nine broad ethnic groups.
Pragmatic factors and language choices
First and foremost, the underrepresentation of scientists with East Asian and African names may be due to pragmatic challenges faced by U.S.-based journalists in interviewing them. Factors like time zone differences for researchers based overseas and actual or perceived English fluency could be at play as a journalist works under deadline to produce the story.
We isolated these factors by focusing on researchers affiliated with American institutions. Among U.S.-based researchers, pragmatic difficulties should be minimized because they're in the same geographic region as the journalists and they're likely to be proficient in English, at least in writing. In addition, these scientists would presumably be equally likely to respond to journalists' interview requests, given that media attention is increasingly valued by U.S. institutions.
This study conceptualizes a quadrant model characterizing four profiles by contrasting university scientists’ multiple goals: research performance and commercialization. Since literature shows that these goals are conflicting but not mutually exclusive, social capital theory is drawn to test the influence of scientists’ bonding, bridging, and linking social capital on their profile affiliation.
Website: International Research Scientist Awards
Professor, #Lecturer, #Scientist, #Scholar, #Researcher, #Analyst, #Engineer, #Technician, #Coordinator, #Specialist, #Writer, #Assistant, #Associate, #Biologist, #Chemist, #Physicist, #Statistician, #DataScientist, #Consultant, #Coordinator, #ResearchScientist, #SeniorScientist, #JuniorScientist, #PostdoctoralResearcher, #LabTechnician, #ResearchCoordinator, #PrincipalInvestigator, #ClinicalResearchCoordinator, #GrantWriter, #R&DManager, #PolicyAnalyst, #TechnicalWriter, #MarketResearchAnalyst, #EnvironmentalScientist, #SocialScientist, #EconomicResearcher, #PublicHealthResearcher, #Anthropologist, #Ecologist
More Details:
Tilte: International Research Scientist Awards
website: researchscientist.net
Visit Our Award nomination: researchscientist.net/award-nomina...
Contact Us: support@researchscientist.net
Get Connected Here;
Facebook: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61...
Twitter: x.com/scientistaward
Pinterest: in.pinterest.com/ResearchScientist...
Comments
Post a Comment