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水平与关注度持续提升，媒体报道为科研领域推动个体与集体参与气候行动拓展了机遇窗口。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现实挑战。
本研究针对2020年发表的51230篇气候变化领域学术论文开展调研，结果显示，新闻媒体更倾向于宣传多学科期刊以及业内公认的顶级期刊刊载的研究成果。
通过对TOP-100篇被媒体报道的论文与随机抽取的对照样本进行深度内容分析，我们发现新闻媒体仅展现了气候变化知识体系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所发生的大规模、已观测到或世纪末尺度的气候变化后果，扮演哨兵与警示者的角色。而气候变化研究中的社会、经济、技术与能源维度，以及相关过程与解决方案的局部性、短期性尺度特征，均被媒介化报道所弱化。
结合对行为改变背后社会心理机制的梳理，我们对当前判断新闻价值的标准提出了质疑，并指出当前气候变化研究的媒介化传播模式，未能真正推动社会各界切实参与气候行动。
要实现气候变化研究媒介化传播的变革性发展，需要将新闻价值与传播实效相结合，即确保传播内容能够有效呈现那些有望促成公众行为改变的研究成果。
附属数据集1：2020年全年发表的所有气候变化领域学术论文全集，包含新闻与推特的替代计量指标（altmetrics）得分
附属数据集2：Web of Science学科主题分类体系
附属数据集3：针对TOP-100媒体聚焦论文与随机对照样本的内容分析数据集