КОММУНИКАЦИЯ НАУКИ И ОБЩЕСТВА В РАБОТАХ ЗАРУБЕЖНЫХ ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЕЙ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ МЕЖДУНАРОДНОЙ БАЗЫ ДАННЫХ PROQUEST DISSERTATIONS & THESES)

Abstract

Science communication or communication of science and society has become very important in 21st century because of an ever-growing role of science and technology in people’s lives. People themselves have in turn increasingly been engaged in science and technology decision-making. Science communication has been researched abroad for several decades, became meanwhile an independent field of study of which dissertations and thesis are a part. This article describes the collection of international doctoral dissertations included in the world’s most comprehensive repository ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Global (PQDT). Taking into consideration the global terminology controversy and the lack of a unified definition of “science communication”, the first stage of study was a combined keyword search using the search terms selected from the PQDT index: attitudes towards science, citizen science, popularization of science, post normal science, public engagement with science, public understanding of science, science communication, scientific literacy. The search resulted in 2213 dissertations written in 1950–2022 in 11 languages from 19 countries. Further analysis showed that the most active research is being carried out in the USA, China, and the UK. 77 % of the works were written in English, 22 % in Chinese. The first works dated back to the 1950s, but an exponential increase in the number of dissertations began only in the 1980s and could be explained by a new policy making formulated in many countries in the second half of the 1980s to ensure developing and improving science communication. At the second stage, another search was carried out for each term separately to have a picture of trends. It is revealed that until the early 2000s the main dissertation topics were attitude towards science and scientific literacy. In the 2000s, such developing topics as public engagement with science, citizen science, and post-normal science reflected the changing nature of science communication and the transition from the one-way communication model “from scientists to public” to models of public participation and engagement. Since the 2010s, research interests have been shifted to public engagement and new ways of scientists and non-scientists interaction. One of the most actively developing directions is the co-production of knowledge aka citizen science, but the problem of scientific literacy also still remains relevant.