Abstract:
Science journalism is a critical way for the public to learn about and benefit from scientific findings. Such journalism shapes the public\'s view of the current state of science and legitimizes experts. Journalists can only cite and quote a limited number of sources, who they may discover in their research, including recommendations by other scientists. Biases in either process may influence who is identified and ultimately included as a source. To examine potential biases in science journalism, we analyzed 22,001 non-research articles published by Nature and compared these with Nature-published research articles with respect to predicted gender and name origin. We extracted cited authors\' names and those of quoted speakers. While citations and quotations within a piece do not reflect the entire information-gathering process, they can provide insight into the demographics of visible sources. We then predicted gender and name origin of the cited authors and speakers. We compared articles with a comparator set made up of first and last authors within primary research articles in Nature and a subset of Springer Nature articles in the same time period. In our analysis, we found a skew toward quoting men in Nature science journalism. However, quotation is trending toward equal representation at a faster rate than authorship rates in academic publishing. Gender disparity in Nature quotes was dependent on the article type. We found a significant over-representation of names with predicted Celtic/English origin and under-representation of names with a predicted East Asian origin in both in extracted quotes and journal citations but dampened in citations.
摘要:
科学新闻是公众了解科学发现并从中受益的重要途径。这种新闻塑造了公众对当前科学状况的看法,并使专家合法化。记者只能引用和引用有限的消息来源,他们可能会在研究中发现谁,包括其他科学家的建议。任何一个过程中的偏见都可能影响谁被识别并最终被纳入来源。为了研究科学新闻中的潜在偏见,我们分析了《自然》发表的22,001篇非研究文章,并将这些文章与《自然》发表的研究文章进行了预测的性别和姓名来源的比较。我们提取了引用的作者的名字和引用的演讲者的名字。虽然一篇文章中的引用和引用并不反映整个信息收集过程,它们可以提供对可见来源的人口统计学的洞察。然后,我们预测了被引用作者和演讲者的性别和姓名来源。我们将文章与比较器组进行了比较,比较器组由《自然》的主要研究文章中的第一位和最后一位作者以及同一时期的SpringerNature文章的子集组成。在我们的分析中,我们在自然科学新闻中发现了引用男性的倾向。然而,在学术出版中,报价比作者率更快地趋向于平等代表性。《自然》语录中的性别差异取决于文章类型。在摘录和期刊引文中,我们发现具有预测的凯尔特人/英语起源的名称存在明显的过度表示,而具有预测的东亚起源的名称存在不足,但在引文中却有所减弱。