Written evidence submitted by Spindle Fibre Films (COM0005)
Clickbait and open source.
Much of the mistrust around scientific journalism is the lack of integrity of the sources. I know that clicks sell advertising, and a story without a clickable title is a low value story. So regardless of the scientific fact of the research or evidence the story with a sensational title is immediately both of interest and of lower credibility in the eyes of the public. Until telling science stories isn’t driven by clicks and advertising revenue the integrity of the research will remain secondary.
The second aspect to this particular angle is access to the sources. Say you do click on the article and there are conclusions and implications drawn around the research - very rarely do the articles cite the paper or provide a link to it. If they do much of this information is only available to academics, with the public only able to see. More academics need to be encouraged to make their research open source. Being scooped is not a problem with online date stamps, doi integration for tracking where the research is cited, and it increases the chances of collaboration of an applied nature.
I’d love to see an online ‘how to critically analyse a scientific paper’ around n size, double blinding, variable accountability etc… that encouraged the population to become more scientifically literate.