Medialising Brain Diseases: Interactions between Research and Mass Media

这一提议采纳了“科学媒体化”的概念，这一概念被更广泛地用于描述大众媒体在当前社会变革中日益重要的作用。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。这进一步意味着，这种取向影响研究过程及其结果：科学出版物和专门知识。到目前为止，这一概念主要是通过案例研究来支持的，并不适合确定这类案例有多普遍。因此，目前的方法不能系统地洞察科学家的媒体取向对科学努力的核心：知识生产的影响。这个项目解决了这个缺点。它将侧重于五个潜在的影响：1。《科学》、《自然》等著名科学期刊对媒体逻辑的适应越来越多，这对研究的选择影响越来越大。2. 随着时间的推移，新闻稿和科学出版物中夸大科学陈述的现象越来越多。引用率的提高取决于媒体的关注。4. 越来越多的研究与新闻界已经建立的公共话题联系在一起。5. 有声望的科学家越来越多地参与公共讨论。它旨在通过使用Altmetrics， Lexis-Nexis和道琼斯Factiva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，使我们不仅可以比较单个病例或学科，还可以比较2000-2004年和2014-2018年两个时期的神经科学领域。我们打算把两个不同的研究部门结合起来，这两个部门到目前为止几乎完全没有联系。第一个分支侧重于区分不同等级或形状的媒介化的相关指标。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程度、多元化和两极分化作为媒介化的指标，但通常不会将对科学生产的影响纳入其设计中。第二类包括最近主要发表在医学期刊上的一些系统研究。它们表明，生物医学研究结果经常在新闻稿中被歪曲，而这些歪曲在媒体中传播。这些虚假陈述夸大了科学观察的社会利益，可能被解释为媒介化的一个指标。

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.