Yzabella Sielaff

English 110

Report on Research in Progress

    My research so far has been pretty successful. I’ve managed to find many sources that align with and contribute to my topic. A majority of them I found on Google, Google scholar, and CUNY OneSearch. One article I found on CUNY OneSearch was “Anti-Vaxxers, Politicization of Science, and the Need for Trust in Pandemic Response”, where the author discussed the impact of poor science communication from political stances on the spread of COVID-19. It also has some interesting sources that I might look into further. Another source I found on Google Scholar was “Scientific progress despite irreproducibility: A seeming paradox”. This particular source has narrowed down all of the major problems scientific communication faces and how they contradict each other. 

I know those are definitely credible sources, however when doing a general search, it gets more complicated. Even when I try to find sources on general public websites, I run into issues accessing them. They either don’t have what I’m looking for or they cost money to read. After some digging I found an article by the Jonathan Hopkins News-Letter called, “What role should the government play in science communication?”. This has some good information on the line that the U.S. walks on violating the First Amendment when it comes to sharing scientific information. Another source I found was a publication by The Female Scientist titled, “Why scientists need to be trained in science communication!”. I almost overlooked it because of the style of the website, but the references are all valid sources. It lays out simply, yet academically, the issues and possible solutions to scientific communication. There has been a bit of a step forward with websites such as “phys.org” or “Science Daily”, but the content they offer is often quite obscure. When you click the tab on Google for “Scientist discovery list” all of the photos are in black and white. There isn’t a single photo of a recent scientist. On the other hand, social media has been a big new way of communicating scientific endeavors with the public. A source I found (on Twitter) for this was an article called, “Chemists are finding their place on TikTok” on c&en. Also, my own experience on TikTok contributes to this too. However, social media has issues with content restriction and the “algorithms”, especially TikTok. 

There was one source, however, that I decided to discard. It was an article from phys.org titled, “New website evaluates the effectiveness of science communication activities”. I chose not to select this article because it just didn’t provide me with any useful information, it was mostly a promo for a website that wasn’t in English. One source that I’m considering using is the one from the CUNY OneSearch titled, “Counteracting the politicization of science”, because I wanted to see the perspective of someone on my topic. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if I will use it or not because it was written before COVID-19, where a majority of this issue came to light, so it would be complicated to see if the author’s evidence is still applicable.

Some missing parts of my research are that I need more articles from the media as well as some more recent (post covid) articles with more connections that I may not have considered already. I also need to narrow my topic down and make it more specific and concise. It’s kind of all over the place because of how complicated this subject is. I think I’m going to start by centering on physics communication in the United States, and the impact of the pandemic, so I’ll have to keep searching for any articles that discuss those topics.