Abstract
There is increasing scrutiny around how science is communicated to the public. For instance, a Twitter account @justsaysinmice (with 70.4K followers in January 2021) was created to call attention to news headlines that omit that mice, not humans, are the ones for whom the study findings apply. This is the case of many headlines reporting on Alzheimer disease (AD) research. AD is characterized by a degeneration of the human brain, loss of cognition, and behavioral changes, for which no treatment is available. Around 200 rodent models have been developed to study AD, even though AD is an exclusively human condition that does not occur naturally in other species and appears impervious to reproduction in artificial animal models, an information not always disclosed. It is not known what prompts writers of news stories to either omit or acknowledge, in the story's headlines, that the study was done in mice and not in humans. Here, we raised the hypothesis that how science is reported by scientists plays a role on the news reporting. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether an association exists between articles' titles and news' headlines regarding the omission, or not, of mice. To this end, we analyzed a sample of 623 open-access scientific papers indexed in PubMed in 2018 and 2019 that used mice either as models or as the biological source for experimental studies in AD research. We found a significant association (p < 0.01) between articles' titles and news stories' headlines, revealing that when authors omit the species in the paper's title, writers of news stories tend to follow suit. We also found that papers not mentioning mice in their titles are more newsworthy and significantly more tweeted than papers that do. Our study shows that science reporting may affect media reporting and asks for changes in the way we report about findings obtained with animal models used to study human diseases.
Highlights
As requested by our data provider Altmetric, these data cannot be Scientists have for some time voiced concern that media reporting of scientific findings, especially those related to health and diseases, are often misleading and that journalists frequently make inappropriate inferences regarding causality, using sensational language to describe scientific findings obtained in biomedical studies [1,2,3]
We investigated if research papers whose findings apply to mice, and not to humans, but which omit this caveat in their titles, generate significantly more news stories with headlines that likewise omit mice, if compared to research papers with titles that do mention mice
Using Altmetric Explorer, we collected and analyzed the headlines of the digital news stories generated for each group of research papers in our sample and determined whether or not the news headline mentioned mice
Summary
Scientists have for some time voiced concern that media reporting of scientific findings, especially those related to health and diseases, are often misleading and that journalists frequently make inappropriate inferences regarding causality, using sensational language to describe scientific findings obtained in biomedical studies [1,2,3]. In March 2019, James Heathers, of Northwestern University, launched the Twitter account @justsaysinmice
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