Abstract
In recent years, the use of videos by the scientific community has evolved continuously. Researchers, communicators, and other players are using audio-visual media to reinvent their stories, to deconstruct complex phenomena and to increase the outreach and impact of their scientific publications. An example of this trend is the video abstract: an audio-visual representation of the key findings described in the written abstract. Much of the research in this area is new and focused on content analysis and classification of online science videos. Furthermore, studies with videos and environmental communication are attached to specific topics like climate change. So far, a small fraction of publications has explored the study of the video abstract, its effects, and its potential, as one general scientific area. This paper provides the first characterization of video abstracts in the areas of Ecology and Environmental Sciences. We identified video abstracts in 29 scientific journals, based on impact, representativeness and visibility criteria. A database of 171 videos, from 7 publishers and 17 different video channels was created. Each video was analyzed for different parameters. The analysis considered not only characteristics of each video, but also characteristics from the corresponding scientific papers. Results indicate that between 2010 and 2018 the number of video abstracts increased sevenfold. Despite this growth, there was no solid strategy for disseminating the videos. While most of them are still associated with classic models, such as documentaries, disruptive formats such as animation are the ones that arouse greater interest. Professional shorter videos (2–3 min in length) showed a significantly higher number of daily views and their papers garnered a higher number of citations per day. This data, combined with future qualitative research, will help to develop a model for validating the quality of an Ecology video abstract and provide new insights into the global study of audio-visual communication of science.
Highlights
Science communication is usually associated to the written press format (Bentley and Kyvik, 2011) and, scientific papers continue to be the most used format in academia to disseminate the research produced (Jamali et al, 2018)
“Ecology and Environmental Sciences under the lens”, we present the reasons on choosing this scientific area; in “Literature Review” we briefly review the previews works on video categorization, focusing on the content factors chosen for the analysis
The results of this study highlight the fact that the use of video abstracts in Ecology and Environmental Sciences is a complex and dynamic process
Summary
Science communication is usually associated to the written press format (Bentley and Kyvik, 2011) and, scientific papers continue to be the most used format in academia to disseminate the research produced (Jamali et al, 2018). Video-Abstracts in Ecology publications can benefit from these new communication tools that go far beyond written papers with graphs and tables (Rodrigues and Godoy-Viera, 2017; Jamali et al, 2018). A wide range of audio-visual resources are available nowadays, with increasing adoption by the scientific community; amongst these resources, videos have gained special prominence (León and Bourk, 2018). Science online videos can be defined as short scientific audiovisual content that aims to reach a wider audience using resources that demystify science features for the general public while keeping its rigor and precision (Morcillo et al, 2016; GarcíaAvilés and de Lara, 2018). It is not a standardized communication tool since it is characterized by a great variety of formats and an increasing mix of genres (Erviti and Stengler, 2016; García-Avilés and de Lara, 2018)
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