Science Press Releases

Twitter Thread from Sabine Hossenfelder

"The major insight that I have taken away from this is to never, ever, trust a press release."

 

Oddly, the comments below focus on bad behaviour by scientists and journalists, without homing in on the university comms departments which write the press releases, whose main (and unhelpful) motivation is to make the institution look innovative and exciting to prospective paying students.

 

For a lot of the “medical breakthrough” PRs you have to read 3-4 paragraphs before you get to “in mice”.

 

To be fair the departments will be mainly faced with a paper that has an 'impact' section and an abstract that clearly dictates 'selling points' that are hard to correct even if said comms/Press dept can 'see through them' when they look at the design, methods, results. You'd basically have to explain why you left out 'that magic bit'/it would be an elephant in the room, and potentially then be overruled by the institutional political machinations (ie it taken out of your hands by convening some sort of committee/escalation on said decision).

Partly because if you released a press release that was still somehow just as interesting, but didn't include the dramatic claim in an impact section or abstract of the paper, then all those behind it would be a wee bit paranoid that upon someone clicking through to read it (although we know most don't, and annoyingly these days many can't - because they aren't allowed to view more than the abstract without paying large amounts or already having a subscription -which means you are another academic or ltd numbers outside that) would see red flags or read into that. And all the reputational stuff that might say.

Journalists on the other hand, who do not work for the same institution as the writer of the academic paper, are supposed to be the layer that takes the release with a pinch of salt and delves in. But I've noticed that spoon-feeding has been a biggie of recent years, and I'd be intrigued whether it is always due to laziness/space-filling or whether it is politics between the sender of said press release who wants it published and the receiver doing some sort of favour etc.