The climate change research that makes the front page: Is it fit to engage societal action?

By growing awareness for and interest in climate change, media coverage enlarges the window of opportunity by which research can engage individuals and collectives in climate actions. However, we question whether the climate change research that gets mediatized is fit for this challenge. From a survey of the 51,230 scientific articles published in 2020 on climate change, we show that the news media preferentially publicizes research outputs found in multidisciplinary journals and journals perceived as top-tier. An in-depth analysis of the content of the top-100 mediatized papers, in comparison to a random subset, reveals that news media showcases a narrow and limited facet of climate change knowledge (i.e., natural science and health). News media selectivity reduces climate change research to the role of a sentinel and whistleblower for the large-scale, observed, or end-of-century consequences of climate change for natural Earth system components. The social, economic, technological, and energy aspects of climate change are curtailed through mediatization, as well as local and short-term scales of processes and solutions. Reviewing the social psychological mechanisms that underlie behavioral change, we challenge the current criteria used to judge newsworthiness and argue that the consequent mediatization of climate change research fails to breed real society engagement in actions. A transformative agenda for the mediatization of climate change research implies aligning newsworthiness with news effectiveness, i.e., addressing the extent to which communication is effective in presenting research that is likely to produce behavioral change.

Separate data 1: full corpus of scientific articles published on climate change over the year 2020, with altmetrics scores for news and tweets
Separate data 2: categorization of Web of Science Topics into disciplines.
Separate data 3: content analysis for the TOP-100 and random subsets.

随着公众对气候变化的认知与关注度持续提升，媒体报道为科研推动个人与集体参与气候行动拓宽了机遇窗口。然而，我们不禁质疑，被媒体报道的气候变化研究是否足以应对这一挑战。我们对2020年发表的51230篇气候变化相关学术论文开展调研，结果发现，新闻媒体更倾向于宣传多学科期刊以及被视为顶级期刊上刊载的研究成果。通过对媒体报道量排名前100的论文与随机抽取的论文子集进行深入内容分析，研究表明新闻媒体仅展现了气候变化知识中狭窄且有限的维度，即自然科学与健康领域。新闻媒体的选择性报道将气候变化研究的作用局限为：针对地球自然系统组分的大规模、已观测或世纪末级气候变化后果，充当预警哨兵与警示者。而气候变化的社会、经济、技术与能源维度，以及相关过程与解决方案的本地尺度与短期尺度特征，均被媒体报道所弱化。在梳理了支撑行为改变的社会心理学机制后，我们对当前评判新闻价值的标准提出了质疑，并指出，由此产生的气候变化研究媒体化现象，未能真正推动社会参与气候行动。气候变化研究媒体化的变革议程，意味着需要将新闻价值与传播有效性相结合，即评估传播在呈现那些有望促进行为改变的研究时的有效程度。
独立数据集1：2020年发表的全部气候变化相关学术论文全集，附带新闻与推特的altmetrics（替代计量指标）得分
独立数据集2：Web of Science主题分类体系下的学科分类表
独立数据集3：针对媒体报道量前100的论文与随机抽取子集的内容分析数据集