Based on a survey of 223,587 scientific news articles, Hao Peng, Misha Teplitsky, and David Jurgens found that researchers with non-English names were more likely not to be directly mentioned in the news and to have their names replaced by those of their institutions.
News media play a key role in disseminating research findings to the public. It also adds to the academic prestige of scientists and shapes the public’s perception of who does good science. Yet we know little about how journalists choose to portray researchers in their news stories and the potential downstream consequences these choices have on the career and leadership performance of marginalized groups in academia.
To begin to analyze how the demographics of scientists relate to scientific reporting, it is useful to divide media coverage into two aspects: (1) probability of coverage: whose newspaper is reported and what we can call (2) the quality of coverage: how comprehensive and accurate the reporting is when published. For example, media coverage may give a lot or little space to describe the researchers and potentially include their quotes.
we know little about how journalists choose to portray researchers in their news stories and the potential downstream effects these choices have on the careers and leadership performance of marginalized groups in academia
In our recent paper, we focused on the quality of coverage, measuring the variation in how journalists choose to describe the researchers behind an article. Specifically, we consider whether the author is mentioned by name. By focusing on the subset of articles that receive coverage, we circumvent the issue of whose research gets news coverage in the first place, which itself may be related to author demographics and other confounding factors such as newspaper salience and self-promotion of the author in social networks.
We focused on authors’ “ethnicity” rather than their nationality for two reasons: (1) author nationality can be very volatile, especially in the US (2) journalists usually only see authors’ names and affiliations when reading the article, and names often reliably signal race and ethnicity. We decided to use ethnicity because it contains richer information than race.
To compare the information available to journalists, we base our research on perceived ethnicity derived from names. This choice involves significant trade-offs. On the one hand, self-described identities may sometimes differ from perceived ones, and some authors may identify with multiple ethnicities. Nevertheless, in most of these cases of inconsistency, journalists will not know how the authors self-identify and will instead infer identity from the names. In these cases, using the authors’ identities would be problematic because it would misrepresent the actual perceptions that journalists form and likely use when writing their stories.
we found that most authors with minority ethnic names were significantly less likely to be cited than those with English-language names.
Our corpus of news articles was obtained from Altmetric.com. Consists of 223,587 news items from 288 US-based publications reporting on 100,486 research articles. In addition, we obtained metadata about papers and authors from the Microsoft Academic Graph and Web of Science databases. For each paper, we focused on the authors with the highest “risk” of being cited (first author, last author, and all other authors listed as corresponding author) and treated each triplet (narrative, paper, author) as an observation in a logistic regression, which predicts author mention with author demographics and controls. We developed a computational method to detect three types of attributions, including name mentions, citations, and institution mentions.
We found significant differences in author mentions between the ethnicities inferred from the names. These discrepancies are robust to important factors related to the article, story, and author, such as research topics, journal impact, author prestige, corresponding author status, affiliation location, name complexity, article length, etc. Specifically, we found that most authors with minority ethnic names were significantly less likely to be cited than those with Anglophone names. Of these minority groups, authors with European names are most disadvantaged, while East Asian and African names are most disadvantaged. There is up to a six percentage point reduction in the likelihood of East Asian and African names being mentioned, which equates to a 15% reduction for authors with English-language names in media exposure.
We find that journalists are more likely to replace named authors from Africa and East Asia with their institutions.
Second, the differences are just as large for authors with African and East Asian names who are affiliated with American institutions. In particular, US-based Chinese, non-Chinese East Asian, and African authors experience 4.8, 3.8, and 4.6 percentage point declines in citation rates compared to their English-speaking American counterparts. This suggests that being tied to US institutions in the same geographic region does not eliminate the observed differences.
These findings may be due to media bias. For example, journalists may consider certain names less authoritative than English names. However, our result thus far does not imply direct media bias, as all US-based authors may still differ in other factors, such as perceived or actual English proficiency, which may influence journalists’ decision to contact them. To directly test the rhetorical bias of a portion of the media, we examined “institution substitution,” where the author is mentioned by their institution but not by name, for example, listed as “researchers at the University of Michigan.” We find that journalists are more likely to replace named authors from Africa and East Asia with their institutions. Among US-based authors, this type of mention should not depend on pragmatic factors such as English proficiency. Thus, this substitution effect likely reveals that journalists assign less rhetorical value to authors with minority names.
The discrepancy in press release outlets is particularly noticeable because stories in these outlets tend to reuse content from university press releases, suggesting that university press offices themselves, while having less discrepancy compared to other types of outlets, still prefer to mention scientists with English-language names
Third, we also find consistent differences across three types of outlets, including press releases, general news, and stories published in science and technology-focused outlets. The discrepancy in press release outlets is particularly noticeable because stories in these outlets tend to reuse content from university press releases, suggesting that university press offices themselves, while having less discrepancy than other types of outlets, still prefer to mention scientists with English names. This result is unexpected, as local press offices are expected to have more direct exposure to their researchers, reduce stereotyping abuse, and be more responsible for fair representation of minority researchers.
The biggest differences are seen in the General News editions, e.g. The New York Times and The Washington Post, where again scholars with names associated with Chinese and African origins have a 6.0-8.0 percentage point drop in mention rates. This significant drop cuts almost a third of the deserved media exposure of a large scholarly community (General News publications mention authors with an average chance of 24.2%). Because General News publications often have well-trained editorial staff and science journalists dedicated to accurately reporting science and tend to publish longer stories that have room for mention and engagement with authors, this result is troubling. Historically, these ethnic minorities have been stereotyped and underrepresented in American media and leadership roles, which continues in objective science reporting in all types of media. The mechanisms of this variation deserve further investigation.
Thus, our work suggests that differences in science media are likely to compound across different aspects of coverage, leading to differences in outcomes far greater than those shown by studies at any one stage.
Our work shows that science journalism is rife with inconsistencies in which authors get named when their research papers are reported in the US news. Mention rates are particularly low for East Asian and African names, less pronounced for European names, and even less pronounced for Indian and Middle Eastern names. As science continues to globalize and is increasingly produced by authors from non-Western countries, how the English-language media respond to non-English-speaking scientists will become increasingly important.
While our study focuses only on the “second stage” of media coverage of science and its quality, it is likely that such ethnic differences are even greater in the first stage of coverage, where the media chooses whose articles to report first. Thus, our work suggests that differences in science media are likely to compound across different aspects of coverage, leading to differences in outcomes far greater than those shown by studies at any one stage.
