In a post last week, I noted that Scienceblog.com, which looks like a news site, is actually a collection of press releases from universities and other research outfits. It’s a perfectly fine source of news releases, but the site, in my view, didn’t do nearly enough to alert readers that what they were reading was not a collection of independently reported news stories, but releases sponsored by institutions. The difference, of course, is that press releases are likely to give us the most glowing view of the research–not necessarily the most accurate.
ScienceDaily is another one you should watch out for. It looks like a news site–it calls itself a news site–but it’s not a news site. And stick around for the kicker on this post; it’s a good one.
The tageline on ScienceDaily’s homepage is, “ScienceDaily–Your source for the latest research news. The home page leads off with “Today’s Top Science News,” and, below that, “More Science Headlines.”
I didn’t see anything at the top that told me where these stories came from, but from the number of stories on the home page, you’d think these folks had a considerable staff. There’s a lot of news there! Or should I say, “news”?
Marching off to the “About This Site” link, I read that ScienceDaily has three million monthly visitors and 15 million page views a month. The site has 65,000 research articles and is updated several times a day, seven days a week. Not until halfway through the lengthy “about us” do we get to the heart of the matter:
ScienceDaily is best known for showcasing the top science news stories from the world’s leading universities and research organizations….Universities have come to rely on ScienceDaily to spread news about their scientists’ findings to a wider audience.
Well, well. In the interest of transparency, ScienceDaily would have been far more accurate if it said, at the top of its home page, “ScienceDaily–Press releases from world’s leading universities and research organizations.”
So why isn’t that the tagline? Maybe because readers are more likely to show up if they think it’s news, rather than if they know it’s press agentry. Maybe if ScienceDaily were transparent, it wouldn’t get three million visitors and 15 million page views a month.
Now we know how ScienceDaily generates so many stories: It aggregates university handouts. You and I could set up a site to do that in 15 minutes and start stealing ScienceDaily’s readers.
Maybe that’s another reason ScienceDaily obscures what it’s doing–nobody finds out that this is much easier than it looks. ScienceDaily makes the easy stuff (republishing press releases) look hard (“the site covers discoveries in all fields of the physical, biological, earth and applied sciences”).
ScienceDaily claims to do original stories and original reporting, and I’m happy to believe that.
Ready? Here’s the kicker:
I found one recent example of what I thought was original reporting: “Scientists Create Human Embryonic Stem Cells With Enhanced Pluripotency,” ScienceDaily wrote on 5/3. At the bottom of the story, it says:
Adapted from materials provided by Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. Original article written by Nicole Giese.
So there you go–original reporting.
Except that when I compared the story with the Whitehead Release, I found only the most minor copyediting changes. (Try it yourself, using “track changes” in Microsoft Word.)
How could this be original reporting by Nicole Giese, when it was nearly identical to the press release?
Surprise! Nicole Giese did NOT write an original story for ScienceDaily; she wrote the press release!
ScienceDaily not only republished the press release, it republished the byline. This is a level of cleverness I haven’t seen elsewhere on the net. Congrats, ScienceDaily: You guys are good.
– Paul Raeburn
I do not see the problem.
I read Science Daily for science news, they do a great job digesting scientific articles and press releases for me.
yeah but they are in a way stealing or phrasing in the wrong way its sources of information
I love Science Daily and I do not care if it is not original reporting. At least they give proof of what they are writing and it is not just empty words.
The issue is that press releases aren’t peer reviewed science…
If you require peer review, subscribe to Scientific American or JAMA. Science Daily is just a source of information about some of the directions that science and technology are heading. If you were confused about this, check with someone in research in the field you wish to follow. Perhaps, you think that National Geographic might be posing as an anthropology journal. Where is their disclaimer? You need to find a hobby.
Whether peer reviewed or not can be set apart via a Reference, or the lack of it, to the source of the report, i.e. whether the source is a peer reviewed journal or not.
To simply augment previous comments, if the sole or most significant issue is re-publication before peer review, a response that seems sufficient is not to accept the content as established and continue to read whatever’s available from reliable sources.
The argument made above is as cunningly crafted as the pre-publication acts of Nicole Giese that Mr Raeburn suggests, without quite saying so, amounted to “writing” — or editing and publishing — in bad faith.
The only real tempest in this small teapot is whether Science Daily’s banner assertion that it publishes “news” is honest. OED’s second definition of “news”, the first non-obsolete definition is:
“2. The report or account of recent (esp. important or interesting) events or occurrences, brought or coming to one as new information; new occurrences as a subject of report or talk; tidings.” (Downloaded 1228 CT, 1-16-2022)
It would be pedantry to proffer and argue from a definition that’s obscure and overly broad or too narrow, but OED’s states better than I could precisely what I understand “news” to mean. Others can decide for themselves.
It’s understandable that within a journalism department at MIT, “news” may have acquired a more restrictive meaning, but applying such a meaning to the Science Digest’s banner is wrong, and if done by a professional teacher or practitioner of journalism, it is an intentional wrong.
It seems that, coming from a department within MIT, a suggestion to Science Daily by phone, in person, or letter, might have resulted in re-wording the banner to suit Mr Raeburn without posting an alarming academic diatribe under the logo of a journalism department at MIT, however flimsy it proves to be on closer examination, that the writer knew would distract folks like me who take some trouble to discern the reliability of our sources amid the havoc wrought by perverts of reason who’ve been liberated and enabled to say anything on the internet.
I mean to say that the damage this post has caused may be small, but it is not inconsiderable.
I’m left wondering what the real beef is, while continuing to use Science Daily for what it claims to do and actually does: make available reports of recently claimed discoveries. And, regrettably and maybe most importantly, to be more skeptical of future posts originating from MIT.