Tag: Media

How I harnessed media engagement to supercharge my research career

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Podcasts and radio appearance can disseminate your science and raise your profile.Credit: Mixetto/Getty

Eighteen months ago, I had zero media experience. I’m a physical-activity researcher in the school of Allied Health and Human Performance at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. In the three years since completing my PhD, I hadn’t written articles for anyone outside my scientific community, courted mentions in a newspaper or even thought about speaking on the radio or on podcasts. I was content to spend my days head-down in research, analysing data and aiming to publish papers. Media publicity was nowhere on my radar.

At the start of 2023, along with my colleagues, I published a major systematic review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine¹ that summarized much of the research on how exercise can help to reduce depression and anxiety. It was unusual for two main reasons. First, we synthesized all the evidence in the field, which involved collating the results of nearly 100 systematic reviews. Second, we analysed the most effective exercise types, along with varying intensities and durations of exercise and the effects across diverse clinical and non-clinical populations.

How to work with your institution’s press office to maximize the reach of your work

We found overwhelming evidence that exercise improves mental health across numerous healthy and clinical populations. Higher-intensity physical activity was linked to more substantial improvements in symptoms, but the effectiveness of interventions decreased with longer programmes of training.

The findings stuck a chord with many people, so the review ended up getting a lot of attention. I received requests from around the world to do radio interviews and go on podcasts. I was also invited to give talks and presentations in-person across Australia and virtually for international events.

Researchers should court media attention responsibly, with the ultimate goal of informing the public about scientific breakthroughs. But I’ve found that it can also raise your personal profile and advance your career.

Spreading the message

Over the past year, my media exposure has continued, with my research being featured in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Daily Mail, Yahoo, Times Higher Education, Cosmos magazine, Medical News Today and Science Daily. This has opened up unexpected opportunities. It has resulted in researchers from around Australia reaching out to me to collaborate on further reviews and meta-analyses on topics related to physical activity and lifestyle behaviours, allowing me to expand my research into different domains.

Collection: Science communication

My media exposure has also led to industry collaborations. One Australian start-up company, which runs an app that aims to help office workers to exercise, reached out and provided funding for me to evaluate the effectiveness of their tool. The results are being prepared for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The opportunity not only enabled valuable research examining an intervention in a real-world setting, but also laid the groundwork for potential collaborations with industry partners.

Furthermore, media exposure has helped me to develop valuable transferable skills. I had to hone my presentation skills to prepare simplified explanations of my research and communicate across fields. Giving media interviews enhanced my skills in translating complex findings into everyday terms, using relatable analogies, being concise and staying composed under pressure. These have all proved invaluable for me in research, public speaking and collaborations beyond academia.

Ben Singh learnt valuable skills through media exposure.Credit: Ben Singh

Although the media interest was serendipitous at first, I’ve learnt to be pro-active in boosting media engagement. I now pitch my published papers to relevant journalists and outlets, highlighting what’s new, useful and surprising about my research.

I also regularly write for the website The Conversation to practise communicating research to broad audiences accessibly. I use social media to showcase my work, build authority in my field, share updates, promote publications and connect with peers and the public. And I’ve attended media training offered by my institution, learning skills such as: crafting compelling narratives and soundbites; developing an engaging presentation style; preparing for different interview formats; and translating complex concepts into useful and easily understood analogies.

Prepare to push back

Not all media interactions are perfect. I’ve encountered overly simplified coverage, misinterpretation of my work and pressured timelines. For instance, in the discussion section of our review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, we compared our findings with those from past reviews on how medications affect depression. On average, our results showed that exercise was 1.5 times better than medication at improving symptoms of depression, in terms of effect sizes. This comparison was not the main purpose of our review, but several media outlets portrayed our study as a head-to-head analysis pitting exercise against medication. This oversimplifies the complexity of treatment options and leads to misconceptions about the role of exercise in comprehensive mental health care. The comparison failed to account for the interplay of various factors and individual differences, and could lead people to make inappropriate generalized decisions about their treatment without consulting medical professionals.

How to get media coverage and boost your science’s impact

To prevent this kind of misrepresentation, I learnt to articulate the actual objectives and limitations clearly up front during interviews, conferences and seminars. I also realized that I needed to be prepared to correct any inaccurate portrayals rapidly by providing proper context and caveats.

The potential rewards have made proactively seeking media opportunities worthwhile, even if it felt daunting at first. Rather than leaving it to chance, I’ve been strategic in promoting my own research through media engagement as an early-career academic. The visibility, credibility and skills I have gained have amplified my findings and fuelled my career advancement. I’m glad I stepped out of my comfort zone to embrace media exposure.

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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April 9, 2024
Tweeting your research paper boosts engagement but not citations

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Posting about a research paper on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) doesn’t translate into a bump in citations, according to a study that looked at 550 papers.

The finding comes as scientists are moving away from the platform in the wake of changes after its 2022 purchase by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

An international group of 11 researchers, who by the end of the experiment between them had nearly 230,000 followers on X, examined whether there was evidence that posting about a paper would increase its citation rate.

“There certainly is a correlation, and that’s been found in a lot of papers. But very few people have ever looked to see whether there’s any experimental causation,” says Trevor Branch, a marine ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and lead author on the paper, published in PLoS ONE last week¹.

Every month for ten months, each researcher was allocated a randomly selected primary research article or review from a journal of their choice to post about on their personal account. Four randomly chosen articles from the same edition of the journal served as controls, which the researchers did not post about. They conducted the experiment in the period before Elon Musk took ownership of what was then known as Twitter and complaints of its declining quality increased.

‘Nail in the coffin’

Three years after the initial posts, the team compared the citation rates for the 110 posted articles with those of the 440 control articles, and found no significant difference. The researchers did acknowledge that their followers may not have have been numerous enough to detect a statistically significant effect on citations.

The rate of daily downloads for the posted papers was nearly fourfold higher on the day that they were shared, compared with controls. Shared papers also had significantly higher accumulated Altmetric scores both 30 days and three years after the initial post. Calculated by London-based technology company Digital Science, an Altmetric score, says Branch, is a measure of how many people have looked at a paper and are talking about it, but it’s not a reliable indicator of a paper’s scientific worth. “It’s thoroughly biased by how many people with large followings tweet about it,” he says.

The findings echo those of information scientist Stefanie Haustein at the University of Ottawa, whose 2013 study² found a low correlation between posts and citations.

Haustein says the problem with using posts as a metric is that, even a decade ago, there was a lot of noise in the signal.

“We actually showed that a lot of the counts on Twitter you would get were bots, it wasn’t even humans,” says Haustein, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

She says the more recent departure of scientists from the platform has been the final nail in the coffin of the idea that posting could increase citations.

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March 27, 2024
How OpenAI’s text-to-video tool Sora could change science – and society

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Sora is one of several AI tools that generates video from text promptsCredit: OpenAI

The release of OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video AI tool last month was met with a mix of trepidation and excitement from researchers who are concerned about misuse of the technology. The California-based company showcased Sora’s ability to create photorealistic videos from a few short text prompts, with examples including clips of a woman walking down a neon-lit street in Tokyo and a dog jumping between two windowsills.

Tracy Harwood, a digital-culture specialist at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, says she is “shocked” by the speed at which text-to-video artificial intelligence (AI) has developed. A year ago, people were laughing at an AI-produced video of the US actor Will Smith eating spaghetti. Now some researchers are worried that the technology could upend global politics in 2024.

OpenAI, which also developed ChatGPT and the text-to-image technology DALL·E, debuted Sora on 15 February, announcing that it was making the technology “available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks”. ‘Red teaming’ refers to the process of conducting simulated attacks or exploitation of a technology to see how it would cope with nefarious activity, such as the creation of misinformation and hateful content, in the real world.

Sora isn’t the first example of text-to-video technology; others include Gen-2, produced by Runway in New York City and released last year, and the Google-led Lumiere, announced in January. Harwood says she has been “underwhelmed” by some of these other offerings. “They are becoming more and more vanilla in what they present to you,” she says, adding that the programs require very specific prompts to get them to produce compelling content.

Misinformation is a major challenge for these text-to-video technologies, Harwood adds. “We’re going to very quickly reach a point in which we are swamped with a barrage of really compelling-looking information. That’s really worrying.”

Election fears

That poses particular problems with upcoming elections, including the US presidential election in November and an impending general election in the United Kingdom. “There will be colossal numbers of fake videos and fake audio circulating,” says Dominic Lees, who researches generative AI and filmmaking at the University of Reading, UK. Fake audio of the leader of the UK Labour Party, Keir Starmer, was released in October 2023, and fake audio of US President Joe Biden encouraging Democrats not to vote circulated in January.

One solution might be to require text-to-video AI to use watermarks, either in the form of a visible mark on the video, labelling it as AI, or as a telltale artificial signature in the video’s metadata, but Lees isn’t sure this will be successful. “At the moment watermarks can be removed,” he says, and the inclusion of a watermark in a video’s metadata relies on people actively researching whether a video they’ve watched is real or not. “I don’t think we can honestly ask audiences across the world to do that on every video they’re looking at,” says Lees.

There are potential benefits to the technology, too. Harwood suggests it could be used to present difficult text, such as an academic paper, in a format that is easier to understand. “One of the biggest things it could be used for is to communicate findings to a lay audience,” she says. “It can visualize pretty complex concepts.”

Another potential use might be in health care, with text-to-video AI able to talk to patients in place of a human doctor. “Some people might find it disconcerting,” says Claire Malone, a consultant science communicator in the United Kingdom. “Others might find it extremely convenient if they want to ask a medical professional questions multiple times a day.”

Data management

Text-to-video AI tools such as Sora could help researchers to wade through huge data sets, such as those produced by the European particle-physics laboratory CERN near Geneva in Switzerland and other large scientific projects, says Malone. Generative AI could “sift out code and do the mundane tasks of research”, she adds, but also do “much more sophisticated work [such as] giving it data and asking it to make predictions”.

Concerns have also been raised by people working in creative industries. The US actor Tom Hanks suggested last year that AI could enable him to continue appearing in films “from now until kingdom come” after his death. “If you were a young ambitious actor thinking about their future, and you were told ‘I’m sorry, Tom Hanks is always going to play the leading roles’, would you plan a future in that?” says Lees.

Text-to-video AI will throw up broad issues for society to face. “We’re going to have to learn to evaluate the content we see in ways we haven’t in the past,” says Harwood. “These tools put the opportunity to be a media content creator in the hands of everybody,” she says. “We’re going to be dealing with the consequences of that. It’s a fundamental shift in the way material will be consumed.”

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March 12, 2024
my mission to capture women in science on camera

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Some of the people featured in Elisabetta Citterio’s photographic project STEM Passion, which opens this month at the Berlin Institute of Health.Credit: Elisabetta Citterio

In 2019, molecular biologist Elisabetta Citterio embarked on a journey to highlight the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and to broaden public interest in their research by photographing them. In the course of her project, entitled STEM Passion, Citterio, who studies the molecular mechanisms of DNA repair at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy, has photographed 57 women scientists across 25 research institutes in 9 countries. This month, STEM Passion opens at the Rahel Hirsch Center for Translational Medicine at the Berlin Institute of Health, to coincide with the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February.

Citterio spoke to Nature about her vision and what led her to STEM Passion.

What inspired you to embark on this project to photograph and interview prominent women scientists?

There are so many women scientists who do really interesting research, but they aren’t well known to the general public. That indifference translates to women’s career paths, too. In academia, fewer female than male scientists progress to professorships. In the life sciences, for example, women receive more than 50% of PhDs awarded, but hold only about 30% of tenured faculty positions. So, my wish was to give visibility and voice to the excellent women from diverse backgrounds who are making a contribution to the advancement of science and society.

How did you choose which women scientists to interview?

I tried to work with women in a variety of positions and career categories, not just in academic research, to highlight that there are many paths that someone can follow after completing their education in science. I spoke to women who work in the laboratory, but also to those who are working in science journalism and communication, funding and industry, as well as women who are influencing policy and public health. I also tried to cut across different disciplines to cover women working in immunobiology, mathematical modelling, cell biology and molecular oncology, for example.

Did you see any unifying themes in their decisions to follow a career in science?

Passion seems to be an intrinsic motivation for pursuing science. With passion comes determination. I see the spark in women’s eyes when they speak about their path in science. Even so, they are not afraid to change that path, if they see that there is something else that they can contribute in a different way.

They really want to inspire the younger generation to follow a career in science. Curiosity also came up frequently, which I guess isn’t that surprising, because curiosity allows you to ask questions and explore the world. Curiosity and knowledge were shared by many of the women I profiled, but so, too, was commitment, hard work, resilience and perseverance. And trust: not only in yourself, but also in your ability to learn during your career.

Why did you choose photography to portray women’s pursuit of science?

I wanted to show that it is normal to be able to see women as scientists. When children are asked to draw a scientist, they often portray a man, although a news story in Science shows that young people are increasingly drawing scientists as women.

That is also why I didn’t choose to portray them all in the lab, to broaden the perspective of what it means to be a scientist. When I travelled to photograph these scientists, I asked whether there were places that were of interest to them, professionally or personally. That’s why you see some of them at the lake or by the sea, because these settings had special meaning for them.

Can you tell me about the exhibition?

My co-organizer, Claudia Cagliano, a communications consultant and adjunct professor at the European Design Institute (IED) in Turin, is the project manager and shaped the storytelling.

Elisabetta Citterio hopes her photography will boost public interest in the achievements of female scientists.Credit: Courtesy of Elisabetta Citterio

STEM Passion is not limited to photography. It includes the portraits, the interviews, and a video installation that comprises all the photographs of the scientists, with an accompanying soundtrack created by composer Andrea Pozzoli. The sounds and the scientists’ voices, in the languages of their diverse countries of origin, blend together, creating a sense of emotional involvement.

The exhibition has already been shown in nine cities, including Milan and Verona in Italy; Lausanne in Switzerland; and, most recently, at the University of Ulm in Germany.

How were you personally affected by the project and the scientists whom you met and interviewed?

It was an enriching experience. I was impressed by the trust with which the scientists welcomed me. I’ve learnt that sharing your experience and making your voice heard is very important. I would also like to add that there is no fixed formula for being a scientist. There are many paths and no set image of who can be a scientist. I hope that my photography reflects that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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February 1, 2024