When one Chinese national recently petitioned the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to become a permanent resident, he thought his chances were pretty good. As an accomplished biologist, he figured that news articles in top media outlets, including The New York Times, covering his research would demonstrate his “extraordinary ability” in the sciences, as called for by the EB-1A visa.
But when the immigration officers rejected his petition, they noted that his name did not appear anywhere in the news article. News coverage of a paper he co-authored did not directly demonstrate his major contribution to the work.
As this biologist’s close friend, I felt bad for him because I knew how much he had dedicated to the project. He even started the idea as one of his Ph.D. dissertation chapters. But as a scientist who studies topics related to scientific innovation, I understand the immigration officers’ perspective: Research is increasingly done through teamwork, so it’s hard to know individual contributions if a news article reports only the study findings.
This anecdote made me and my colleagues Misha Teplitskiy and David Jurgens curious about what affects journalists’ decisions about which researchers to feature in their news stories.
There’s a lot at stake for a scientist whose name is or isn’t mentioned in journalistic coverage of their work. News media plays a key role in disseminating new scientific findings to the public. The coverage of a particular study brings prestige to its research team and their institutions. The depth and quality of coverage then shapes public perception of who is doing good science and in some cases, as my friend’s story suggests, can affect individual careers.
Do scientists’ social identities, such as ethnicity or race, play a role in this process?
This question is not straightforward to answer. On the one hand, racial bias may exist, given the profound underrepresentation of minorities in U.S. mainstream media. On the other, science journalism is known for its high standard of objective reporting. We decided to investigate this question in a systematic fashion using large-scale observational data.
Chinese or African names received least coverage
My colleagues and I analyzed 223,587 news stories from 2011-2019 from 288 U.S. media outlets reporting on 100,486 scientific papers sourced from Altmetric.com, a website that monitors online posts about research papers. For each paper, we focused on authors with the highest chance of being mentioned: the first author, last author and other designated corresponding authors. We calculated how often the authors were mentioned in the news articles reporting their research.
We used an algorithm with 78% reported accuracy to infer perceived ethnicity from authors’ names. We figured that journalists may rely on such cues in the absence of scientists’ self-reported information. We considered authors with Anglo names – like John Brown…