Abstract
Abstract. If you are a geoscientist doing work to achieve impact outside academia or engaging different audiences with the geosciences, are you planning to make this publishable? If so, then plan. Such investigations into how people (academics, practitioners, other publics) respond to geoscience can use pragmatic, simple research methodologies accessible to the non-specialist or be more complex. To employ a medical analogy, first aid is useful and the best option in some scenarios, but calling a medic (i.e. a collaborator with experience of geoscience communication or relevant research methods) provides the contextual knowledge to identify a condition and opens up a diverse, more powerful range of treatment options. Here, we expand upon the brief advice in the first editorial of Geoscience Communication (Illingworth et al., 2018), illustrating what constitutes robust and publishable work in this context, elucidating its key elements. Our aim is to help geoscience communicators plan a route to publication and to illustrate how good engagement work that is already being done might be developed into publishable research.
Highlights
Scientists are increasingly encouraged to have “impact”, effecting real-world changes (e.g. Reed, 2018; Hillier et al, 2019b), which involves communication with nonacademic audiences
Geoscience Communication (GC) recognizes a variety in authors’ perspectives, motivations, resources, and experience and that they may be more or less cognizant of application and impact or research. In practice this means that GC accepts papers that focus on one part, while encouraging fully integrated studies; an example of such a study is Archer et al (2021b), which assesses a geoscience communication initiative as an activity in itself but does this by using a robust evaluation set into an appropriate theoretical framework of how such initiatives are designed, so that portable lessons can be learnt and applied more widely and theory advanced
Frameworks, and tools can provide detailed guidance on planning your communication activities (Cooke et al, 2017; Illingworth, 2017; Salmon and Roop, 2019), but here we focus on the broad steps involved in designing geoscience communication efforts aligned with leading science communication practices and in a way that can facilitate the publication of these efforts
Summary
Scientists are increasingly encouraged to have “impact”, effecting real-world changes (e.g. Reed, 2018; Hillier et al, 2019b), which involves communication with nonacademic audiences. All research articles should include an explicitly marked section that considers the ethics of the investigation and should demonstrate how the research has received ethical clearance from their research institute or professional body This editorial expands upon these requirements to provide guidance on what constitutes robust and publishable peerreviewed research in this journal. The advice in this paper is based on the experience of the current editors, which includes geoscience research, knowledge exchange, science communication and public engagement with science, geoscience education, and the application of social science methods. This article starts by making a case for publishing papers relating to geoscience communication work We outline what makes a geoscience communication study publishable as a research article in a peer-reviewed journal We provide an introductory toolkit of research techniques (Sect. 8), cover ethics to demystify this requirement (Sect. 9), and discuss how to make your article accessible (Sect. 10), before finishing with a basic framework for turning geoscience communication work into research articles suitable for publications in GC (Sect. 11)
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