Read the full story from the London School of Economics.
For researchers seeking mainstream attention for their work, the media remains the most effective route. This was increasingly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, when an array of social and natural scientists became household names as a result of regular coverage in the media. Research, particularly health research, continues to provide a steady flow of news content to wide audiences. Yet, as I wrote in 2018 much of this coverage often comes without important links to the underlying research, or even details of who authored, published and funded it.
Social media was always hoped to be a means to circumvent mainstream media to reach a general public. However, while this may be true for a small pool of high profile academics, these dynamics often rely on existing relations with traditional media. This hierarchy is likely more entrenched now as social media has fractured and become a more toxic space for many academics. Traditional media therefore remains a vital gatekeeper and amplifier of academic research.
Understanding the often mysterious processes of how research is picked up and used across different sections of the media is therefore important. To do this we looked at a sample of research that included at least one author from the University of Sheffield that had been cited in either national or local media. We obtained the data from Altmetric.com to explore whether the news story included supporting information that linked readers to the research and those behind it. These were links to any of the authors, their institution, the journal or the research funder. We also investigated how much of this research was available via open access.
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