Public communication by research institutes compared across countries and sciences: Building capacity for engagement or competing for visibility?

Abstract

Leading academic institutions, governments, and funders of research across the world have spent the last few decades fretting publicly about the need for scientists and research organisations to engage more widely with the public and be open about their research. While a global literature asserts that public communication has changed from a virtue to a duty for scientists in many countries and disciplines, our knowledge about what research institutions are doing and what factors drive their 'going public' is very limited. Here we present the first cross-national study of N = 2,030 research institutes within universities and large scientific organisations in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We find that institutes embrace communication with non-peers and do so through a variety of public events and traditional news media-less so through new media channels-and we find variation across countries and sciences, yet these are less evident than we expected. Country and disciplinary cultures contribute to the level of this communication, as do the resources that institutes make available for the effort; institutes with professionalised staff show higher activity online. Future research should examine whether a real change in the organisational culture is happening or whether this activity and resource allocation is merely a means to increase institutional visibility.

Returns of research funding are maximised in media visibility for excellent institutes

“…All strata were equally represented in the sampling frames (N = 200 institutes per area of research, per country) so that results would not be biased towards fields engaging more in public communication. The study has a 25% response rate, which is in line with what is expected for online-based surveys, and is considered good when the sampling units are organisations rather than individuals (Sheehan, 2001;Shih and Fan, 2008) (see Entradas et al, 2020, for a detailed description of methods, including sample design, data collection, and national samples).…”

“…To address these research questions, we build on a previous framework (Entradas et al, 2020) that conceptualises institutional public communication as a function of context factors (C factors) and public communication disposition factors (D factors) that are likely to influence communication activity (e.g. Kreimer et al, 2011;Bentley and Kyvik, 2011;Mejlgaard et al, 2019, Entradas andBauer, 2017).…”

Fostering Social Project Impact with Twitter: Current Usage and Perspectives

“…Finally, it is important to mention that the analysis has a limitation with regards to the countries where the projects have been developed. Twitter had a different degree of influence and presence depending on the country and when this social network gained and increased popularity in disseminating data using social media [48,49]. In this respect, in future developments it will be interesting and relevant to explore where the projects were based.…”

Perceptions, relationships, expectations, and challenges: Views of communication and research for scientific dissemination in Brazilian Federal Institutes

“…In addition to the work they do, this unknown environment may create uncertainties in the relationships between communication professionals and researchers. This is also due to historical contexts, the dynamics of institutions, and the lack of science communication practice [ 11 ]. Another barrier related to this context is the fragile institutional support to the development of this integration and interaction between professionals from different areas [ 12 ].…”