Insights
Anecdata & Bad Opinion
As the world pushes us more and more into reactivity, more and more opinion content — even by researchers — follows suit, trading in anecdata.
Anecdata: “anecdotal information gathered and then presented as fact,” says the Urban Dictionary.…
Read MoreCrowdsource Your Thought Leadership
If you’re having trouble getting your SMEs to author individual pieces of thought leadership, try crowdsourcing those pieces instead from across your organization, or from an event you hosted.
What I’m talking about is very different than a multi-authored piece with infinite rounds of edits and approvals.…
Read MoreCormac McCarthy & How to Write a Good Science Paper
A number of people have sent me the recent Nature column listing novelist and screenwriter Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper. Have you seen it?
McCarthy has provided (I was surprised to learn) “extensive editing to numerous faculty members and postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico” as well as other well known scientists.…
Read MorePositioning is Not More Cowbell
We message in research communications. Foundationally.
We message everything. Message our findings, our talks, our interviews, our videos, even our podcasts (if they’re bad).
We have to message because the way researchers talk with each other (through papers, in conferences) can’t be understood by the rest of the world.…
Read MoreMeat & Expertise
I wish I could feel vindicated by those five new super-controversial meta-analyses just published by the Annals of Internal Medicine contradicting nearly everything we’ve ever heard about the health risks to individuals of eating red and processed meats. (Good overviews here and here.)
But I feel sad — and not just because I haven’t eaten meat for more than 30 years.…
Read MoreFor the Birds
Researchers: just passive participants in those terribly misleading media campaigns for their papers?
Michael Schulson writes in Undark about the hyping of that big bird-decline Science magazine study I wrote about last week. In Schulson’s retelling, it was
- A) Overenthusiastic science communicators +
- B) A big journal hungry for media that offers very little space to the paper itself (hence, for scientific nuance) that led to
- C) a sensationalist media storyline to take advantage of a growing public taste for apocalypse.
The Greta, Trump & AOC Effects
A list member writes in response to my column yesterday about whether Greta Thunberg has made it safe to use science as a trump card again (I quote from it below, with permission):
… Read MoreTo your question, “has she changed the rules?” The answer is no.
Greta’s New (Old) Rules
I don’t know if Greta Thunberg is going to change the world.
I know that she and her fellow under-20 climate activists have already changed research communications.
But I don’t know if it’s for the better.
Greta Thunberg argues that politicians and private-sector leaders — Davos and UNGA types — need to “listen to the science.”
She vets her speeches with scientists.…
Read MoreAsking the Bigger Questions, Part Deux
Here’s another email in response to my column last week on “Bill Gates & Asking Bigger Questions,” talking about a researcher the correspondent knows. I’m publishing it here, anonymized, with permission:
… Read MoreSomething X – and he is a great research scientist – does is he challenges paradigms.
What a Great Op-Ed Looks Like
Grad students aren’t supposed to have the time to write op-eds for major newspapers — or the juice to get them published. Certainly not without a tenured co-author.
Tell it to Chris Herring, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California Berkeley, who wrote this quite good op-ed for the Washington Post, “Democrats hate Trump’s plan for homelessness.…
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