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by PaulKeeble 231 days ago
There is an enormous gulf between research in general and the people who should be reading it from a professional point of view. Science communication is really broken and what makes the trade press or press generally is largely about whether a papers authors manage to write a good press release and effectively writes an article themselves.

We need more New Scientist type magazine like things that do decent round ups of scientific findings for various fields that do a good job of shuffling through the thousands of papers a month and finding the highest impact papers. The pipeline from research to use in professions can drastically be improved. At the moment you end up having a hosepipe of abstracts and its a lot of time to review that daily.

1 comments

I get what you are saying, and I just want to add another factor here.

Science journalism has gotten a lot harder over the years simply due to how fragmented ("salami sliced" [1] as it is sometimes called) so much research is now. "Publish or perish" encourages researchers to break up a single, coherent body of research into many smaller papers ("minimum publishable units") rather than publishing a larger and easy-to-follow paper. I find it to be one of the most annoying current practices in scientific publishing, because it makes it difficult to see the bigger picture even if you are a subject matter expert. It is hard to find every piece of the research given how split up it becomes, though forward and backward citation analysis helps. That only gets worse when trying to summarize the research from a less technical perspective as science journalists do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_...