It’s not just political science. Sean Carroll complains about the difficulty of attracting sustained media attention in the field of cosmology, which, unlike political science, (a) has media sex-appeal, and (b) has a truly wonderful open access archive of papers available for anyone to browse through.
So why are galaxies at redshift 8 considered news, if galaxies at redshift 10 have already been discovered? As Charlie Petit talks about at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the difference seems to be that the former were announced at a press briefing, while the latter just appeared on arxiv.For better or for worse, conventional science journalism has been cut back to the point where most reporters have no choice but to wait for press releases to appear to write a story. They don’t have the resources to scan through arxiv postings every day — and even if they did, the precious newsworthy nuggets are rather sparsely scattered through the mass of Kuhnian normal science. And let’s not even think about the idea that journalists should spend time (and money) going to lots of conferences and talks and chatting with scientists about what’s hot in their fields these days — the resources just aren’t there.
There is some room for blogs to help out here. A blog by a respectable scientist can point to interesting stories that didn’t appear in any press releases, and journalists can follow up. (I know it’s happened here before.) But the thing about blogs is that they’re remarkably non-systematic; bloggers mention things because they personally find them interesting, not because they feel a duty to the wider public. The nature of journalism is changing rapidly, and it’s not clear how things will eventually shake out. I certainly hope that we continue to enjoy the work of people like Cowen, who make the extra effort to find good science stories and spread them widely.
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Henry: One of the problems with Arxiv is that it’s full of crappy articles too. Most notably (for us) are the sort of paper where a team of underemployed physicists excitedly apply some complicated mathematical model to reveal hitherto-unknown truths about social science.
Of course, these are the sorts of Arxiv papers that often make their way into the news and into the blogosphere.
In many ways, I think journalists browsing through the Arxiv looking for interesting papers would be much worse than the current standard, which is for reporters to go to conferences, take notes, and then call up experts for their comments.
The “Shalizi-Tozier model”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/347.html of the production of papers by physicits about evolutionary biology is relevant here.
Yes, that all makes sense. Although I don’t think Cosma is quite right about Duncan Watts. I’ve worked with Duncan, and his social network models are to me much more interesting and realistic than the various adaptations of the Erdos-Renyi model that I’ve seen from many physicists.
In any case, I certainly wouldn’t claim that all the social science in Arxiv is crap, just that the crap is what might get noticed by journalists who would put in the effort to look for stuff. The particular paper I had in mind that I really hated is this:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/04/coalition_dynam.html
See also here:
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/06/more_on_coaliti.html
P.S. I got my undergraduate degree in physics, myself.
I actually think he completely agrees with you about Watts and likes his work a lot – http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/complex-networks.html – the difference being that whether Watts is a ‘real’ sociologist or not, he is very well published in sociology journals, very aware of the literature etc and thus making a real contribution.
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