Medialising Brain Diseases: Interactions between Research and Mass Media

这一提议采用了“科学中介化”的概念，这一概念已被更广泛地用来描述大众媒体在当前社会变革中日益增长的作用。这意味着科学家、研究机构和科学出版商积极适应媒体逻辑，寻求媒体报道。它进一步表明，这种取向影响研究进程及其结果：科学出版物和专门知识。到目前为止，这一概念主要得到了案例研究的支持，这些案例研究不适合确定这种情况有多普遍。因此，目前的方法不能系统地洞察科学家的媒体导向对科学工作的核心--知识的生产--的影响。这个项目解决了这一弱点。它将集中于五个潜在的影响：1.媒体逻辑越来越多地被著名的科学期刊如《科学》或《自然》采用，这越来越多地影响到研究的选择。2.新闻稿和科学出版物中对科学陈述的夸大随着时间的推移而增加。引文率的提高取决于媒体的关注度。4.通过新闻业与已经确立的公共专题相联系的研究所占比例不断上升。5.增加具有较高声誉的科学家参与公共话语。它的目的是通过使用Altmetrics、Lexis-Nexis和DowJones Factive a数据库的组合来研究这些潜在的影响。我们将建立一个大型数据库，使我们不仅能够比较单个病例或学科，而且能够比较神经科学作为一个领域在两个时间段：2000-2004年和2014-2018年。我们打算合并两个不同的研究分支，这两个分支到目前为止几乎完全没有联系。第一个分支侧重于相关指标，以区分不同级别或形状的调解。属于这一分支的研究使用大众媒体中关于科学问题的公共话语的广度、多元化和两极分化作为调解的指标，但通常不将对科学生产的影响纳入其设计中。第二个分支包括一些系统研究，主要是最近在医学期刊上发表的。他们表明，生物医学的发现经常在新闻稿中被歪曲，这些歪曲在媒体中传播。这些歪曲夸大了科学观察的社会利益，并可能被解读为调解的指标。

This proposal picks up the concept of „medialisation of science“ that has been taken up more widely to describe the increasing role of mass media in current societal changes. It implies that scientists, research organisations and scientific publishers actively adapt to media logics and seek media coverage. It implies further that this orientation affects the research process and its outcome: scientific publications and expertise. Up to now, this concept has been mainly supported by case studies that are not suitable to determine how common such cases are. Therefore current approaches cannot provide systematic insights into the repercussions of media orientation of scientists on the core of scientific endeavour: the production of knowledge. This weakness is addressed by this project. It will focus on five potential repercussions: 1. The increasing adaptation of media logics by prestigious scientific journals like Science or Nature that affects the selection of studies more and more. 2. The increase of exaggerations of scientific statements in press releases and scientific publications over time.3. The boost of citation rates dependent upon the media attention. 4. The rising share of studies that are linked to already established public topics by journalism. 5. The increase of scientists with high reputation taking part in public discourses. It is intended to research these potential repercussions by using a combination of Altmetrics, Lexis-Nexis and DowJones Factiva databases. We will constitute a large database enabling us to compare not only single cases or disciplines but neurosciences as a domain across two time periods: 2000-2004 and 2014-2018.We intend to combine two different research branches, which are up to now almost completely unconnected. The first branch focuses on indicators relevant to distinguish different grades or shapes of medialisation. Studies belonging to this branch use extent, pluralisation and polarisation of a public discourse on science issues in mass media as indicators for medialisation, but do usually not integrate repercussions on science production into their design. The second branch consists of a few systematic studies mainly published recently in medical journals. They showed that biomedical findings are often misrepresented in press releases and that these misrepresentations spread in the media. These misrepresentations overstate the social interest of the scientific observations and might be interpreted as an indicator of medialisation.