Source: The media covers only a narrow slice of climate research
Climate change research is much more diverse than what the public hear from in the media, new study finds.
July 4, 2023
Tens of thousands of papers about climate change are published every year, but media coverage isn’t giving the public a full picture of this research, according to a new study. The findings suggest mass media’s potential to increase public awareness, concern, and action against climate change is going partly unfulfilled because of the way scientific journals, university press offices, and journalists deem research newsworthy—or not.
“Current knowledge produced by scientists on climate change is much more diverse than what [members of the public] hear from in the media,” says study team member Marie-Elodie Perga, who studies the impact of climate change on alpine lakes at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Perga and her colleagues identified 51,230 scientific papers on climate change published in 2020. They gathered information on media coverage of these papers from Altmetric.com, a service that tracks mentions of scientific studies in more than 5,000 media outlets.
The researchers then analyzed the characteristics of the top 100 scientific studies that received the most media coverage, and compared them to a randomly selected group of 100 climate change papers published in 2020.
The more than 50,000 papers published on climate change that year received 36,355 mentions by international news media, the researchers report in the journal Global Environmental Change. But just 9% of the papers received any media coverage at all, and only 2% received extensive coverage with more than 10 mentions in the media.
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