Scientific communication beyond academia: writing practices and scientists’ experiences

Other conference contribution, 2022

Scientists’ communication outside academia—science communication—has increased in recent years along with the political will to democratise access to knowledge. Clearly, in this push towards engagement with society academics themselves play a central role, but questions remain of what they actually write beyond scientific publication. What other genres are written by scientists, in different fields? What are their experiences and what can we learn from them? We summarize a 2-year project that examined science communication writing practices at a university of technology. In phase one, we adopted content and network analysis to map the types of texts that are most frequently written, identifying topics, fields, and collaborative networks. Our results indicate a varied and uneven picture: science communication is done mostly by tenured academics in fields where research has a clear impact on society. In phase 2, through ethnographic narrative interviews we investigated established scientists’ experiences, motives, and practices: what they write, how they do it and why, and the place and space that science communication takes in their work life and career. The scientists we interviewed told very different “stories”, yet common themes emerged. First, their motives align with the notion of ”scholarship of engagement” (Boyer, 1996): science communication has democratic value as a means to educate and share scientific knowledge (as opposed to neo-liberal marketization). Secondly, they engage in different writing practices based on the nature of their work—producing texts such as reports to industry, non-fiction books, and debate articles. Third, they engage with science communication for intrinsic motives, writing mostly in their spare time, mostly without training or support. In the final phase of the project, we focus on the metacognitive strategies that these experienced scientists adopt when writing for readers outside academia, on the premise of research theorizing metacognition as facilitating transfer of writing skills across genres and tasks—as integrated in models of writing expertise. We conclude with suggestions for further research and the development of training programs that build on genre pedagogy.

Boyer, E. L. (1996). The scholarship of engagement. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 49(7), 18-33.