News stories as evidence for research? BBC citations from articles, books and Wikipedia

Although news stories target the
general public and are sometimes inaccurate, they can serve as sources of
real-world information for researchers. This article investigates the extent to
which academics exploit journalism using content and citation analyses of online
BBC News stories cited by Scopus articles. A total of 27,234 Scopus-indexed
publications have cited at least one BBC News story, with a steady annual increase.
Citations from arts and humanities (2.8% of publications in 2015) and social sciences
(1.5%) were more likely than citations from medicine (0.1%) and science
(<0.1%). Surprisingly, half of the sampled Scopus-cited science and
technology (53%) and medicine and health (47%) stories were based on academic research,
rather than otherwise unpublished information, suggesting that researchers have
chosen a lower quality secondary source for their citations. Nevertheless, the BBC
News stories that were most frequently cited by Scopus, Google Books and
Wikipedia introduced new information from many different topics, including
politics, business, economics, statistics, and reports about events. Thus, news
stories are mediating real world knowledge into the academic domain, a
potential cause for concern.

尽管新闻报道面向普通大众且有时存在不准确之处，但仍可作为研究者获取现实世界信息的来源。本文通过对斯考普斯（Scopus）收录文献所引用的在线英国广播公司（BBC）新闻报道开展内容与引文分析，探究学术界对新闻资源的利用程度。总计有27234篇斯考普斯收录文献至少引用过一篇BBC新闻报道，且该类引用量呈逐年稳步增长态势。艺术与人文领域（2015年占该领域发文量的2.8%）与社会科学领域（1.5%）的引文占比，显著高于医学领域（0.1%）与自然科学领域（<0.1%）。令人意外的是，在抽样的被斯考普斯收录的科技类（53%）与医学健康类（47%）引用新闻中，半数内容基于学术研究，而非未公开的信息，这表明研究者为其引文选择了质量较低的二手来源。尽管如此，被斯考普斯、谷歌图书（Google Books）与维基百科（Wikipedia）最频繁引用的BBC新闻报道，涵盖了政治、商业、经济、统计数据以及各类事件报道等众多主题，传递了全新的信息。由此可见，新闻报道正将现实世界知识传导至学术领域，这一现象或引发潜在的担忧。