Medialising Brain Diseases: Interactions between Research and Mass Media

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Lehmkuhl
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 411038189

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Cooperation Partners: Estelle Dumas-Mallet, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Francois Gonon