A common way to calculate an academic article’s impact is to count the number of citations it receives. This system measures an article’s influence within academia: a quasi-hermetic world of scholars speaking to other scholars via peer-reviewed journals and books. Citation-counting is an imperfect method because some journals are much more prominent than others. An article in Nature is likely to get more hits than an article in a lesser-known publication regardless of the article’s merits (although, the reasoning goes, an article has to be pretty good to be published in Nature in the first place).
More daunting is the task of measuring the impact of scholarly work on the public. But that’s just what the Faculty Media Impact Project, announced Tuesday, seeks to do.
The project comes from the Center for a Public Anthropology, a nonprofit founded by Rob Borofsky from Hawaii Pacific University. The center aims to encourage academics to address public issues in a way that non-specialists can understand. The media impact study swaps academic citations for media citations.
Researchers from the center ran searches in the Google News archives to find out how often nearly 12,800 social scientists at 94 universities had appeared in the news between 2006 and 2011. The center included more than 6,000 news sources in the searches. For the purpose of the study, “social sciences” included anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology.
The University placed 25th overall in the rankings the center posted online. Of the five disciplines the center surveyed, our faculty members supposedly wield the most influence in sociology (eighth) and politics (18th) and least in anthropology (64th).
The media impact project is promising because it provides an incentive for social scientists to share their findings with the public. Academics have jobs because they are experts in their fields. Too often, news articles quote empty-headed pundits or sources who don’t know what they’re talking about. As fun as it may be for a politics professor to pull up such an article in class the next day and explain what a news outlet got wrong about Syria, it is more helpful for a newspaper to get it right in the first place. Getting it right involves talking to experts. An injection of scholarly insight could do a lot to improve the quality of reporting and commentary that we receive from a host of publications, particularly when it comes to complex topics.
The burden for getting involved in public conversations should not fall solely on academics. Faculty members should attempt to contribute to public dialogues by agreeing to interviews and writing letters and guest articles when possible. But equally, reporters should seek out relevant scholars to interview. Journalists should also hesitate before calling the same scholars over and over again. When an academic gains a reputation for being willing and able to talk to reporters — Politics Prof. Larry Sabato is one example — it is almost inevitable that he or she will gain a disproportionate amount of media citations. Calling the same scholars repeatedly runs the risk of overlooking other sources who could offer contrasting perspectives.
A third party will prove crucial in increasing the public impact of scholars. University communications centers are a vital link between academia and media outlets. The public-relations apparatuses at most top universities are responsible for synthesizing complicated information into press releases that overworked journalists can read and understand. The more energy that public-relations staffs at universities devote to promoting faculty research efforts, the greater of an impact social scientists will have on public discussions.
Talking to journalists should be considered part of the job of being an academic, especially for social scientists. Still, as admirable as the media impact project is, the study’s central premise misses the point of why scholars should become involved in public conversations. The study’s animating question, displayed prominently on its website, is: “Should social science faculty who receive billions of public dollars for their research have some civic responsibility?” The question, as phrased, is leading. Of course social scientists should be held accountable to making a public impact, we think. But the urgent reason why the worlds of academia and media must overlap more than they currently do has little to do with accountability. It has everything to do with maximizing human talents for the public good. Tapping into the stores of intelligence in the academy can do much to help us figure out public problems.
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