YouTube has become a complement learning platform which fosters learning on demand with educational videos. Educational videos are understood as a fruitful strategy to enhance the user’s knowledge and are applied in schools, as well as in science communication, e.g., to inform about climate change. This paper discusses two perspectives which become visible in the current research literature on educational videos on YouTube. First, studies assume that watching educational videos changes the attitude or behavior of the recipients. Second, studies question whether educational videos have a higher impact than other information materials such as texts. We frame both perspectives with regard to theories from media effect studies and learning concepts from education science and discuss their conclusions for educational videos on YouTube. We will first focus on students as a target group for educational videos, but in the further course, we will discuss the results for the public as targeted group of science communication as well. In the final section we will summarize which potentials and limitations educational videos have for educational purposes in science communication.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has sadly shown, the decision against vaccination is often linked to political ideologies and populist messages among specific segments of the population: People do not only have concerns about a potential health risk associated with vaccination but seem to have also adopted more populist attitudes towards science. In this study, the relationship between science-related populism and individuals’ attitudes towards vaccination was examined, presuming that scientific-related populism also influences individual responses towards different vaccinations. As different types of diseases and their vaccines might be perceived rather distinctively by the public, different vaccinations were considered. The survey is based on responses from 870 people from Germany and Austria. Results indicate that science-related populism influences responses towards some vaccination types, especially for those that receive extensive media coverage such as COVID-19 and measles (MMR). There was no significant impact of science-related populism on individuals’ vaccination intentions for other vaccines like seasonal influenza, human papillomavirus, or tick-borne encephalitis. In conclusion, limitations and directions for future research are addressed.

In a period characterized by vaccine hesitancy and even vaccine refusal, the way online information on vaccination is presented might affect the recipients’ opinions and attitudes. While research has focused more on vaccinations against measles or influenza, and described how the framing approach can be applied to vaccination, this is not the case with tick-borne encephalitis, a potentially fatal infection induced by tick bites. This study takes one step back and seeks to investigate whether health and scientific frames in online communication are even recognized by the public. Moreover, the influence of selected health- and vaccine-related constructs on the recognition of frames is examined. Study results indicate that health frames are the most easily identified and that their use might be a fruitful strategy when raising awareness of health topics such as vaccination.

YouTube has become an alternative learning platform which fosters learning on demand with educational videos. Educational videos are understood as a fruitful strategy to enhance the user’s knowledge and are applied in media education, e.g. in schools, as well as in science communication, e.g. to inform about climate change. Previous research has analyzed the quality of educational videos especially on medical and scientific topics or which artistic or creative aspects within the videos help to spread information. Yet, theoretical considerations whether educational videos can be used similarly for the heterogeneous group of users are missing. Deriving from both research perspectives, media education and communication science, this paper investigates which potentials and limitations both perspectives provide for educational videos and their users and discusses whether educational videos can be understood as science communication.

This study compares the journalistic selection of scientific results from the field of neuroscience with other scientific disciplines. Based on an input-output analysis using data from the citation database Scopus and the alternative bibliometrics provider Altmetric, we investigated which scientific studies from which scientific journals have been selected by global journalism. Previous research suggests that the selection of sources and results in science journalism follows a certain heavy-tailed distribution, a power law. This structure of journalistic coverage is a result of conditions on the micro-level of actions and decisions of individual journalists. Among these conditions are restrictions that derive from the process and constitution of scientific publishing and research results. We argue that the parameter of such power law distributions can potentially be used to describe selectivity in journalism on a high aggregation level. Differences in the value of the parameter point to differences in the conditions present on the micro-level. To test this assumption, we chose a field of research that has attracted a considerable degree of public attention over the last few years: neuroscience. We expected to find differences in the exponent of power law distributions between neuroscience and other scientific disciplines. Our results show that the frequency distribution of journalistic references to single studies and journals in the coverage of neuroscientific research can be described by a power law. The selection of scientific journals is more homogenous in neuroscience in the sense that there is a less pronounced dominance of just a few journals. It is proposed to interpret this as an effect of the greater popularity of neuroscience.