research papers on comparison of newspapers

Do the print media "hype" genetic research? A comparison of newspaper stories and peer-reviewed research papers

Affiliation.

• 1 Health Law Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton.
• PMID: 15111473
• PMCID: PMC400292
• DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.1030762

Background: The public gets most of its information about genetic research from the media. It has been suggested that media representations may involve exaggeration, called "genohype." To examine the accuracy and nature of media coverage of genetic research, we reviewed the reporting of single-gene discoveries and associated technologies in major daily newspapers in Canada, the United States, Great Britain and Australia.

Methods: We used neutral search terms to identify articles about gene discoveries and associated technologies hosted on the Dow Jones Interactive and Canadian NewsDisk databases from January 1995 to June 2001. We compared the contents, claims and conclusions of the scientific journal article with those of the associated newspaper article. Coders subjectively assigned the newspaper articles to 1 of 3 categories: moderately to highly exaggerated claims, slightly exaggerated claims or no exaggerated claims. We used classification tree software to identify the variables that contributed to the assignment of each newspaper article to 1 of the 3 categories: attention structure (positioning in the newspaper and length of the article), authorship, research topic, source of information other than the scientific paper, type and likelihood of risks and benefits, discussion of controversy, valuation tone (positive or negative), framing (e.g., description of research, celebration of progress, report of economic prospects or ethical perspective), technical accuracy (either omissions or errors that changed the description of the methods or interpretation of the results) and use of metaphors.

Results: We examined 627 newspaper articles reporting on 111 papers published in 24 scientific and medical journals. Only 11% of the newspaper articles were categorized as having moderately to highly exaggerated claims; the majority were categorized as having no claims (63%) or slightly exaggerated claims (26%). The classification analysis ranked the reporting of risks as the most important variable in determining the categorization of newspaper articles. Only 15% of the newspaper articles and 5% of the scientific journal articles discussed costs or risks, whereas 97% of the newspaper articles and 98% of the scientific journal articles discussed the likelihood of benefits of the research.

Interpretation: Our data suggest that the majority of newspaper articles accurately convey the results of and reflect the claims made in scientific journal articles. Our study also highlights an overemphasis on benefits and under-representation of risks in both scientific and newspaper articles. The cause and nature of this trend is uncertain.

Publication types

• Comparative Study
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
• Biomedical Research*
• Genetics, Medical*
• Health Education*
• Information Dissemination
• Newspapers as Topic / standards
• Newspapers as Topic / statistics & numerical data*
• Periodicals as Topic / standards
• Periodicals as Topic / statistics & numerical data*
• Publication Bias

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Comparing the Five Major Newspaper Websites for Genealogy

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The first digital newspaper archive came online more than 20 years ago. Within a few years, the Library of Congress partnered with other federal agencies to launch Chronicling America, a free resource for US newspapers.

Today, newspaper pages can be digitally scanned in a fraction of a second, and websites (both free and premium) host over a billion historical news pages. Even if your relatives appeared in obscure or unexpected publications, digitization has made their names much more discoverable.

Where should you turn to find digitized newspapers for your ancestors’ communities? Perhaps you’ve searched in the past, only to be discouraged by what you couldn’t find. Or maybe you’ve considered subscribing to a premium newspaper website, but aren’t sure which is best for you.

Stop the presses—we’ve hit the stacks to compare the newspaper giants: Chronicling America, Fulton History, GenealogyBank, Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive. Like intrepid reporters, we’ve investigated how much digital content each site offers, as well as their relative strengths. From our scoop, you’ll learn about their curation processes, relevant copyright restrictions, and (of course) what you should expect to pay.

Read on for that and much more. This guide will help you explore the five giants’ holdings before you subscribe, and give you a new respect for the tremendous wealth of old newspapers. Clear your calendars and grab some coffee—a billion pages is a lot of newspaper to cover.

Tip: Before subscribing to a newspaper database, see if a relevant local library or archive has institutional access—or if they have their own free database of the publication(s) you’re looking for!

Chronicling America

Chronicling America is the Library of Congress’ free newspaper portal. At its heart is the U.S. Newspaper Directory , a comprehensive inventory of 150,000-plus titles dating back to 1690. It’s an excellent resource for identifying papers that may have served your ancestral communities, including those for specific audiences (e.g., labor groups, religions, or political parties). You can search by title or browse by place or year.

The directory also includes papers published for certain ethnicity groups, as well as those published in languages other than English. You’ll find more than 2,500 results each for African American and German language titles, plus 200 titles published in Chinese, 42 in Dutch, and 41 in Hebrew.

More than just a finding aid, Chronicling America boasts its own growing library of 20 million pages from 3,810 newspapers across the United States: all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Chronicling America’s digital collections are all in the public domain. (Or, if they were published less than 95 years ago, they carry no known copyright restriction.)

How do papers get chosen for digitization on Chronicling America? Organizations in each state are funded to select (mostly from microfilm) papers that represent the state’s “regional history, geographic coverage, and events of note.” They prioritize “bibliographic completeness, diversity and ‘orphaned’ newspapers (newspapers that have ceased publication and lack active ownership).” That last bit means they want to capture digital content missed by other organizations—a good thing for genealogists.

A nifty search tool on Chronicling America is the Newspaper Navigator. Use it to search for words that appear near photos, illustrations, maps, cartoons, headlines or ads, with the aim of finding images or other major coverage of your topic.

I put together a walkthrough of Chronicling America in the March/April 2022 issue of Family Tree Magazine. You can watch a version on YouTube here.

Fulton History

Whereas Chronicling America is federally funded, the other free website in this comparison is a one-man show. In 1999, New York resident Thomas Tryniski began digitizing back-issues of his local newspaper from microfilm on borrowed equipment.

He shared the issues on a personal website: Old Fulton New York Postcards, also known as Fulton History. Tryniski found the project so fulfilling that he invested in scanners and servers and began digitizing newspapers from around New York. Now the site hosts more than 51 million digitized pages from more than 1,000 papers.

More than half the newspapers on Fulton History were published in New York. You’ll also find relatively large collections for Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Minnesota, Illinois and Connecticut. The site hosts at least one paper for 31 US states and the District of Columbia; a handful for Canada; and one each for the Bahamas, Sierra Leone and Australia.

Tryniski has made extensive notes regarding the copyright guidelines he follows. There’s no indication he has licensed the use of items that might still be in-copyright.

The site appears to have stopped adding new content in 2020, and occasionally it goes down; watch for updates at the site’s Facebook page.

GenealogyBank

GenealogyBank is part of NewsBank, a database company founded in the 1970s that primarily serves institutions like schools and libraries. NewsBank’s collections include historical topics of interest to their research-minded audiences, such as Black history and the US Civil War.

But historical newspapers are the focus at GenealogyBank, where you’ll find millions of pages from 15,000-plus publications from all 50 states and several US territories. GenealogyBank’s biggest collections ( by number of titles) are for New York, California and Massachusetts; Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri and Ohio also rank highly. The site claims strong coverage for Colonial New England, too.

Dozens of titles and millions of pages are added every month. Most come from partnerships with major news providers, but GenealogyBank also digitizes local papers as needed. They prefer to source full or large runs (i.e., consecutive issues). The majority of their archive is unique to their site, some of which is in the public domain and other that is still in-copyright.

The Cultural Collections at GenealogyBank (which you can find in the site’s footer) are curated, searchable collections of ethnic newspapers and other content relating to Americans of African, Hispanic, Irish, Native American, German, Italian and Jewish origins. (According to the company, the Native American collection is especially popular.)

In 2014, GenealogyBank partnered with the free genealogy website FamilySearch to index obituaries from GenealogyBank newspapers. Using artificial intelligence to “read” digitized newspapers, the indexes extract names and vital events to help genealogists find content they might miss otherwise. The indexes on FamilySearch are free, but you’ll need a GenealogyBank subscription to see images from the original publication.

Beyond newspapers, GenealogyBank throws in some extras for family historians. The site offers searchable US census records, various military records, federal land grants, historical maps, government documents, and a historical book archive.

Newspapers.com

In 2012, genealogy subscription website Ancestry.com launched Newspapers.com with 25 million pages from 800 US newspapers. (To put that in perspective: Newspapers.com’s page count at launch—a decade ago—was higher than Chronicling America’s current count.) Since then, Newspapers.com’s content team has acquired titles from across the United States and (increasingly) the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. In just over 10 years, the library has grown 30-fold to 810 million pages from 25,000 newspapers.

Newspapers.com aims to have coverage for every city, working with large publishers (who may own rights to multiple titles) as well as smaller, more local papers. The site’s acquisitions team prefers full runs of a title, so they work with state archives, universities and other repositories to harvest older issues. They prioritize user requests and encourage researchers to alert them to not-yet-digitized newspapers; click Contact , then select Content Suggestion from the Subject drop-down.

The site also includes newer, in-copyright issues. This is especially true of titles available through the Publisher Extra subscription tier, which includes access to 585 million additional pages licensed directly from publishers (some of which are as recent as one month old).

The US states with the highest page counts are California, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio. But the site also has excellent coverage in states with smaller populations, which have correspondingly fewer overall pages. Counting titles (not page counts) might be a more-relevant metric: Looked at this way, Newspapers.com has the scoop on Oklahoma and Nebraska (more than 2,500 titles each) and Kansas (a stunning 5,000 titles).

A growing series of indexes, hosted on sister site Ancestry.com, makes people mentioned in Newspapers.com’s digitized pages even more discoverable. Artificial intelligence has harvested over a billion names from US obituaries and nearly 300 million names from marriage announcements (plus other key data like dates and places). Ancestry.com is also publishing state-by-state name indexes of “Stories and Events,” extracted from throughout old issues, not just vital events announcements.

Ancestry.com users (regardless of whether they also subscribe to Newspapers.com) can search the indexes and attach results from them to their trees. (Only Newspapers.com subscribers can view full articles and clip them.)

NewspaperArchive

Launched in December 1999, NewspaperArchive describes itself as the “first commercial newspaper archive online.” The site’s parent company, WorldArchives, has an executive team that includes former Ancestry.com employees. Like GenealogyBank and Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive also serves schools, libraries and other institutions.

The site is currently home to about 280 million newspaper pages from nearly 16,000 titles, and claims to add one newspaper page per second. NewspaperArchive brings new content through contracts with publishers and by working with libraries that have archival holdings. The site prioritizes according to user demand.

About 75% of the papers in the NewspaperArchive library are from the United States. (Most of the rest are from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.) All 50 US states have coverage, with relative strength in the Mid-Atlantic, Great Lakes and Upper Midwest regions. Older newspapers account for the majority of content; there is relatively strong coverage for the 1800s and early 1900s.

The company prides itself on seeking out small-town newspapers that haven’t been digitized by others. They estimate 85% of their content is unique to their site. They host over 100 African American titles, though there’s not a dedicated portal for searching them.

The site also has an Obituaries search portal, but note that it’s not sourced from their digital newspapers. Rather, the portal returns results from the Social Security Death Index and Legacy.com , a site that curates online obituaries and memorials in partnership with funeral homes and newspapers. This is a static collection, meaning it is not currently growing.

One fun feature for subscribers is the ability to order poster-sized prints of any newspaper page on the site. You can also choose from a pre-selected group of popular pages related to major historic events: Prohibition, the Civil War, the Titanic and so on. Poster prints are created on acid-free, 100% cotton double-weight paper with archival-quality ink.

Tips for Searching Historical Newspaper Websites

Regardless of which site you choose to search on, here are some tips for finding your ancestors among the digitized volumes.

1. Start with free—but don’t stop there.

All US newspaper sleuthing should start with Chronicling America’s U.S. Newspaper Directory, where you can find newspapers that covered your ancestral hometowns. Drill down to the time periods and locales of interest, then click on entries of individual papers to learn what libraries have copies.

In some cases, you’ll learn that a hometown never published its own newspaper. That’s still helpful information, as you can change your focus to nearby cities and niche papers that may have covered your family’s community.

Chronicling America’s own digital collections are relatively small, but still worth a look. Start with the All Digitized Newspapers tab to see what coverage there is for your ancestral region. Narrow to your desired location and time period. Click on individual titles to read excellent historical summaries of the paper, and click through to digitized coverage (under Related Links).

To keyword-search Chronicling America’s 20 million digitized pages from across the country, use the Search Pages and Advanced Search tabs. Even if your community’s papers aren’t digitized by Chronicling America, other publications may have reported items relating to your family.

Turn next to other free websites. Fulton History has digitized more than twice the number of pages as Chronicling America, with extra depth in specific states. The visual experience at Fulton History is relatively primitive (and the website experiences periodic outages), and searches may not always properly direct you to all results. But you probably won’t mind once you start finding free results.

From the main search page, use the various search fields to focus your results. You can also search within a specific publication by selecting a title from this page. Sort by state, county city, title and years covered.

Together, Chronicling America and Fulton History hold about 70 million digitized pages. That’s a lot for the free price tag, even when you consider possible overlap. But that’s still a fraction of what’s available on GenealogyBank, Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.

2. Bigger can be better, but unique is best.

By page count, Newspapers.com is by far the biggest newspaper website. It has nearly three times the digitized pages as NewspaperArchive. (GenealogyBank does not report a page count, but its title count is comparable to NewspaperArchive.) All three of the commercial sites dwarf the free sites: Newspapers.com has more than 15 times the pages on Fulton History and 40 times the pages on Chronicling America.

These larger numbers may increase the odds that a site has news coverage for your ancestors, but there’s no guarantee. In fact, all the sites strive to have unique content. They also have their own priorities and methods for sourcing digitized pages, with different geographical, cultural and chronological strengths. And (critically, for those researching recent decades) only the subscription sites offer in-copyright content.

That’s why it’s an excellent strategy to explore the holdings of GenealogyBank, Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive before you subscribe. See what they have for the times and places you care about. Here’s how to do that at from the home pages (with-out logging in):

• GenealogyBank: Scroll down to Browse Newspaper Titles by State. Click See All States, then select the state. A list of newspaper titles will appear, alphabetized by city. Scroll down, or filter by city or title.
• Newspapers.com: Scroll down to Search by location and click Explore all Locations. You’ll be able to drill down by country, state and city to see what titles and which issues are in the collection.
• NewspaperArchive: Click Browse to drill down by country, state, and city. Select a title, then the option to Browse All for that title to see coverage.

If your favorite library has the institutional versions of the subscription sites (known as America’s GenealogyBank, Newspapers.com Library Edition and Access NewspaperArchive), even better. You can run searches for your family names and locales to see if they’re mentioned.

If your library doesn’t have one you want, request it—maybe they will in the future. Also, many FamilySearch Centers offer Access NewspaperArchive for free; find a location near you.

3. Get to know your search tools.

Keyword-searching old newspapers can be tricky. Newspaper-indexing relies on optical character recognition (OCR) technology. It doesn’t have perfect “eyesight,” so to speak, and it’s even less reliable if pages are faded, smudged or deteriorated. The variety of fonts, columnar layouts, and other issues add to the challenge.

Furthermore, your OCR searches on the newspaper giants take your search terms more literally than you may be used to. For example, when you search for the name Lizzie at your favorite genealogy website, it will probably give you results for Elizabeth, Liza, Liz, and so on. But that’s not the case at the newspaper giants; what you search for is what you get (barring legibility issues). You’ll have to run those extra searches— Elizabeth and so forth—yourself.

That said, the newspaper giants understand the challenges of OCR search. Each offers a variety of options to help you find what you’re looking for. Watch for the ability to:

• Filter your results by place and date/date range
• Enter multiple words or phrases
• Add quotation marks to restrict results to an exact phrase
• Find words within a certain distance of each other on the page
• Use AND , OR , or NOT to specify that you want both words; either word; or to exclude a word from results
• Use wildcards, such as ? to replace a single unknown character (such as Hans?n to search for Hansen or Hanson) or * to replace multiple unknown characters (such as Jorg*n to find Jorgeson, Jorgenson, Jorgensen, etc.)

All the newspaper giants offer helpful search tools. So once you’ve chosen a site, do all you can to master the search experience. Use the advanced search tool instead of the basic one. Save your searches, and sign up for alerts in case new search results are found as more papers are added.

Check out these tips for searching each site:

• Chronicling America: Searching Made Easy
• Jeanette’s Genealogy: Fulton History
• GenealogyBank.com Search Tips
• Introduction to Newspapers.com
• NewspaperArchive: How can I perform a search?

4. Value copyrighted content.

Newspapers published more than 95 years ago are now in the public domain, which is why so much of the digitized content you’ll see online is at least that old. Some—but not all—newspapers published since then are free from copy-right restrictions. (If you’re curious about the details, “The Legal Genealogist” Judy G. Russell explains it well. )

Providing access to content that’s still protected is expensive. The provider has to research each paper’s copyright status and, if needed, find the copyright holder(s) and negotiate licensing agreements. That cost is passed on to users, which is why you’ll only find in-copyright newspapers at the premium websites.

If you pass up the copyrighted content at the subscription giants, you’ll miss nearly 100 years of more-recent news: your mom’s high school play; your grandpa’s football team; family celebrations, tragedies and gossip; legal notices; and career moments. You may also miss obituaries full of mini-family trees and mini-biographies.

The more-recent coverage is just one more reason you’ll want to know about all five of these newspaper giants. They’ve each—potentially—got something to tell you about your relatives’ lives. Which giant will you explore next? And which one after that? Just give yourself a little time. Even with near-instant searching, a billion newspaper pages is a lot of pages.

A version of this article originally appeared in the March/April 2023 issue of Family Tree Magazine.

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A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE NEWS COVERAGE AND CONTENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN TWO ENGLISH DAILIES

Science and Technology has progressed at a rapid pace, especially in the past 50 years. This revolution has occurred in the entire world, and India has not remained behind in this race for progress and development. Our country has also produced several successful scientists, discoveries and inventions, and with increasing focus on education, we stand as the country that has a workforce with very high potential. In order to mark India's position in science and technology the world, it is necessary to ensure communication of science and scientific advancements to the general public. The literacy rate has been increasing, and along with it the readership of newspapers. Hence, newspapers play an important role in educating the community about science and scientific development. This study was carried out to estimate the extent of coverage given to science and the kind of prominence it receives in newspapers. Two newspapers-Times of India, the leading English daily at the national level and Deccan Chronicle, the leading English Daily in Hyderabad city—were chosen for this study. A 20 % sample or every fifth issue from a three month period (January 1-March 31, 2014) was taken. The methodology used was Quantitative Content Analysis, combined with a qualitative analysis of trends in science reporting and presentation of science news. The study found that the two newspapers together devoted 9.57 % of their cumulative news hole to Science news. Individually, the science coverage was found to be 10.09 % in the Times of India and 9.05% in the Deccan Chronicle, which is quite low, given the everyday advancements in the field of science and technology. In both newspapers, the maximum number of items was included in the category of Environment, Nature, Ecology and Evolution. Qualitative Analysis revealed trends such as several science stories being presented from the ―Oddity‖ angle, where rather than the scientific nature of the discovery/ invention, the story highlighted the ‗rarity' of the occurrence. Another trend that was observed was that several stories that had very little connection to science or technology, or had other lifestyle angles, were grouped with hard core science stories, or appeared on the pages that regularly reported science stories, thus confusing readers as to what actually constitutes science news.

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İsmail DÖNMEZ

Science communication describes the connection between science and society in various ways. Written media and media tools contribute to strengthening science communication. The aim of this research was to examine the science and technology news in daily newspapers published in Turkey. Three newspapers in Turkey (Hürriyet, Sabah, and Posta), and their publications between August 28th and September 21st, 2019, were selected in this study. Some reviews have been made into how often these newspapers include science and technology events occurring in Turkey and around the world, what type of scientific news there is, and in what way the socio-scientific contents are presented in newspapers. The content analysis method was used in the study and the news items were presented in categories. As a result of the research, it was observed that science and technology news is given little space in these newspapers and is generally presented in the small columns on the last pages. It was seen that newspapers are an important tool in presenting scientific content and socio-scientific issues to society, but these depictions made are in certain patterns.

Sanju R , R. Sanju

Newspapers cater to the needs of various sections of society and it has a great influence towards the need from the society. It shapes public opinion and influences government to build over policies and decisions to strengthen the democratic nature of the country. In a democratic society, newspaper play the role of the guardian of the rights of the people by giving awareness of particular science news it justifies the role it plays in an individual's life. This study gives a scope towards need of science news and its usability to the readers and helps to identify an outlook structure on how media give importance to science news. It helps to pinpoint the level of preference on science news coverage in three various English newspapers which includes in this study. This research explores the problem by using method of quantitative analysis by finding out factors like comparison of importance of science news than other items are included in the research analysis. This paper is also discussing the factual result of coverage of science news with other news items covered in the daily based on advertisements and sports news. This study will give a

The present study focuses on comparing the coverage of science and technology in major English and Kannada newspapers. The objective is achieved by observing published science information in terms of space allocated for them, formats being used for the presentation and their placement in both lingual dailies. Through Content analysis as the research methodology, results indicates that science information gets very less space in newspapers and Kannada dailies are devoting more space than English lingual dailies. However news is the most preferred format by all the newspapers in disseminating science stories which were placed (spread) across various pages and presented with pictures.

Shivajyoti Das Baruah

38-60Communicating science in today’s world has been a very important aspect of communication. With proliferation of different technological advancements, science communication is very important as modern lifestyle is intricately related with gifts of science. Another important aspect of science communication is the development of scientific temperament. Here media plays a pivotal role. Concentrating on newspapers, the study tries to find out how science is reflected in newspapers of Nagaland. The paper summarizes the study of how science is being communicated, what types of science items are getting preference, in what formats science items are being published in the newspapers. With an in-depth content analysis, the study makes a comparison study between national and regional newspapers of Nagaland. Taking two national newspapers along with three regional newspapers for a duration of three months, the paper discusses about various issues of science communication

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Hamid Abdollahyan, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4852-5300

در این مقاله تلاش می¬کنیم تا تغییرات ساختاری حاصل از انتشار مجلات علمی عمومی ایرانی را به دایره شناخت درآوریم. برای این منظور علاوه بر استفاده از اسناد و مدارکی که روشنگر وضعیت علم در ایران هستند، از تحلیل نمونه¬های تصادفی مجله¬های علمی عمومی ایرانی هم بهره برده¬ایم. این نمونه¬ها هرگز در گذشته به¬طور منظم و سازماندهی شده سیاهه¬برداری نشده بودند و برای اولین بار برای انجام این تحقیق سیاهه¬ای از آنها ایجاد شده است. در این مطالعه با استفاده از روش تاریخی ـ اسنادی و با در نظر گرفتن مجلات علمی عمومی به مثابه محیط¬های فرهنگی، نقش این مجلات در تشکیل و تطور ساختار ارتباطات عمومی علم در کشور مطالعه شده است. Abstract: The purpose of this study is to shed some lights on dissemination of public science magazines as a possible contributive factor to development of science in Iran and something that might be responsible for some of the structural changes in the public science communication and structural changes in Iranian society Methodology: We used a historical/documentary methodology to do this research. Some documents representing the status of as well as some files which were related to the status of science in Iran were selected as units of observations. We also conducted a content analysis and used a random sampling to select samples from among public science magazines. After these samples were selected they were analyzed in terms of their content and orientation. As the samples included documents with such sampling taking place in a situation in which there was no systematic record, the study also created a list of these documents and listings about those magazines that existed prior to the date that we did it for the first time. Findings: Some of the findings show that such magazines have played at least three roles in changing the cultural space of Iranian society including: 1- introducing the infrastructure necessity for development of science, 2- commemoration, admiration, appreciation and acknowledgement of science, and 3- quantitativly developing the institutions necessary for the practice of public science communication. Originality/value: This research is the first research in this field which has dealt with the role of popular public science magazines in structural changes in Iran. Considering public science magazines as a cultural space, it was an attempt to study the role of such magazines in the formation and changes in the structure of public science communication in Iran and how they contributed to structural changes in cultural practice of science.

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In this paper, I analyse the changing rhetorical role of science in UK broadsheet newspapers from 1993 and 2005, and conclude that there have been noteworthy changes. First, science, and more specifically, the formulation the science, is increasingly employed as a model of authority, appealing to ethos rather than logos; the authority is asserted but relatively rarely justified, and this may be considered the most significant change in that it drives several others. At the same time, there has been a popularisation of the science in the newspapers as it becomes an ‘add on’ to popular stories. Furthermore, there is evidence that science is being progressively fitted into the news story format, which demands recency as a news value, as opposed to features-style reports. Finally, science appears to have shifted from its earlier place in opposition to art and culture, to a paradigm in which its primary alter, or opposition, is religion.

Mike S Schäfer

Many citizens and decision‐makers get information about science mainly, or even exclusively, from news and online media. Accordingly, social science has devoted considerable attention to the analysis of science news coverage. A review of this literature reveals a number of ongoing, substantial transformations: In line with the crisis of legacy media, the rise of online communication and the extension of PR by many societal stakeholders, science communication is changing. Science journalism has come under pressure in publishing houses, and science journalists' working conditions have worsened. The amount of science news coverage is stagnating, albeit after a rise that lasted several decades, and seems to navigate towards either a more polarized, controversial reporting about politicized issues such as gene editing, or towards a less critical " churnalism " which is stronger influenced by PR efforts than before. The implications of these changes for science communication and societal decisions regarding science communication are considered.

Dr Ratul Datta

The World Health Organization (WHO) has already declared the corona virus outbreak as global pandemic of international concern and to curb the scourge of the disease 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease, Government of India has already declared national lockdown-1 for 21 days on 24th March, 2020. Meanwhile, Indian newspapers have already boosted up with this coverage and have shown the proliferated enhancement of space share of science news. 4 major circulated English newspapers were selected from 4 metropolitan cities and space share along with total no of science news were analyzed. 4 metro cities are Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai and 4 selected sample newspapers are The Hindustan Times for Delhi, The Telegraph for Kolkata, The Hindu for Chennai and The Times of India for Mumbai. It has been found that, space share of science news has already raised to 64 percent and is still increasing which again has shown the way that, India needs more science journalists and science news should not be dominated in future.

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Why Use Newspapers?

Finding a specific newspaper, finding articles if you have a citation, finding articles on a topic, finding article full text.

• Newspapers in the Library Collection
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Newspaper articles can provide a useful source of information, serving as a primary source of information about historical and current events. Some of the benefits of using newspaper articles as primary sources include:

• seeing how people viewed an event when it happened;
• providing multiple points of view about an issue, including a comparison of the United States and international views;
• permitting researchers to trace the historical development of subjects over time;
• examining issues in the context of their time (by seeing how stories about an issue relate to other stories, or by examining the type of coverage provided);
• giving a snapshot of a time period detailing how people lived, and what they purchased, etc. which is helpful for writers, playwrights, historians, etc.

Because newspapers also contain commentaries or retrospective articles about events, they can also serve as a secondary source. (Modified from Why Use Newspapers? - OhioState University)

To find a specific newspaper, try the following:

1. On the library home page in the search box click the Journals tab. Type the newspaper title.

The search will return results for titles starting with the words you typed. If you want to search for the exact tile or are not sure of the the complete title, use the E-Journals Search (link below the box). From the drop-down menu you can select "Title contains all words" if you are not sure in what order the words appear in the title or "Title equals" (the latter would be useful for short titles like "Time" or "Times").

2. For titles not available online, click "Print Journals" under the search box for journal searches. This will take you to the library catalog. Click on the "Title" tab. Do a catalog TITLE search for the newspaper title. It is useful to limit your search to Periodicals/Serials.

Results list may include several entries for different versions of the title and various formats (print, microfilm, and electronic). If you are confused, ask a librarian for help. For your convenience, information about popular newspapers in our collection is provided in this guide.

Library records may include information about current print holdings and microforms, as well as links to online content. Please note that the catalog does NOT have links to ALL newspapers available online, use the e-journals search for this.

First, determine if the issue of the newspaper is available online.

Method 1 . Search for the article title in quotation marks (and author's name, if the title is common) in the red search box on the home page (under the "Articles" tab).

A successful search will include a link to the article full text.

Method 2. Use the E-Journals search to see if the issue you need is available online. This method is more comprehensive, because it will find ALL of library electronic subscriptions. It also helps when a link in Method 1 does not work.

In the results list find a database that covers the period when the article of interest was published.

You can click "Look up Article" or go to the database. Most databases will allow you to browse to the volume and issue or search for the article.

If the article is not available online or you need to see the article as it was published with original graphics, do a catalog search for the newspaper title in the library catalog as described above . Important note: search for the newspaper title, NOT the article title.

• Start with searching Summon . After you enter your search terms and get results, you will be able to refine you search by Content - Newspapers . You may also select a date range for the articles.

• Search one of the general newspaper databases . You should also be able to filter your results to newspaper content and specify dates.
• Many subject guides provide information on newspapers in the discipline.
• Ask your subject librarian for assistance.

Please note that newspaper databases come in different formats.

Digital archive databases provide scanned reproductions of original newspaper pages (the full-text and any accompanying graphics).

Full-text databases provide the complete text of newspaper articles (but not accompanying graphics).

Index only databases provide citations (references) to newspaper articles. You can use these to identify the publication date and page number details for specific articles.

Therefore you may still need to use digital or traditional microfilms to view the articles you found using an online database.

If you working with newspapers not available online, you may need to use an index, which may be available in print or on a microfilm. Ask for help at the desk or via an online form .

Remember that if we don't have access to an article you can request it through interlibrary loan (ILLiad) .

(Modified from Newspapers & news services: Finding newspaper articles on a topic - University of Wollongong)

• Next: Newspapers in the Library Collection >>
• Last Updated: Mar 11, 2024 11:25 AM
• URL: https://guides.libraries.uc.edu/newspapers

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There were some noticeable differences in the way local and regional papers in the study framed stories versus the three national papers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The differences suggest that the front pages of local papers carry more straight forward reporting that focuses on the facts of a news event while the reporting in the nationals is more interpretative.

Local publications were twice as likely to run straight news accounts as were national papers, 21% versus 11%. Local journalists were also more likely to frame a story around the process of explaining how something works (5% versus 2%), such as a background piece about how the space shuttle flies or the steps to filing your tax return.

National papers, on the other hand, were more likely to look at the big picture when using explanatory narrative frames. They were almost twice as likely as local papers to develop stories as on-going trends or through the lense of historical outlook, (11% versus 7%).

There was little difference between national and local papers when it came to building stories around conflict, horse race or wrong doing. National papers did so 31% of the time while locals did it 28% of the time.

In addition to the overall trends, there were some interesting findings within the individual papers studied. The Los Angeles Times , for instance, was nearly as likely to run a personality profile on the front page (9%) as they were to run a policy exploration frame (10%). Only 7% of the time did it carry a straight news frame­just about half as often as it carried frames of conflict (13%). The L.A. Times , incidentally, ran significantly more front page stories than did any other paper in the study.

The New York Times , the Rocky Mountain News and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune were the most likely of the papers studied to run frames of conflict. They each employed this frame in roughly one out of every six stories (15%).

The Idaho Statesman was more than twice as likely as any other paper to develop a story that explains how something works (8% vs. 3% overall). It also framed stories around an exploration of policy more than others, 12% of the time, a level only matched by the Atlanta Journal . These tendencies suggest a perhaps unconscious bias in journalists toward approaching certain types of news the same way over and over. Not only can this lead to less interesting writing, it could very well cause a journalist to miss the real story or fail to serve the public as intended. If a journalist usually develops stories triggered by a government statement around conflict and horse race, there is a good chance he or she may miss an opportunity to explain the process of what’s occurring or how it fits into other moments in history.

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• NATURE INDEX
• 01 May 2024

Plagiarism in peer-review reports could be the ‘tip of the iceberg’

• Jackson Ryan 0

Jackson Ryan is a freelance science journalist in Sydney, Australia.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Time pressures and a lack of confidence could be prompting reviewers to plagiarize text in their reports. Credit: Thomas Reimer/Zoonar via Alamy

Mikołaj Piniewski is a researcher to whom PhD students and collaborators turn when they need to revise or refine a manuscript. The hydrologist, at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, has a keen eye for problems in text — a skill that came in handy last year when he encountered some suspicious writing in peer-review reports of his own paper.

Last May, when Piniewski was reading the peer-review feedback that he and his co-authors had received for a manuscript they’d submitted to an environmental-science journal, alarm bells started ringing in his head. Comments by two of the three reviewers were vague and lacked substance, so Piniewski decided to run a Google search, looking at specific phrases and quotes the reviewers had used.

To his surprise, he found the comments were identical to those that were already available on the Internet, in multiple open-access review reports from publishers such as MDPI and PLOS. “I was speechless,” says Piniewski. The revelation caused him to go back to another manuscript that he had submitted a few months earlier, and dig out the peer-review reports he received for that. He found more plagiarized text. After e-mailing several collaborators, he assembled a team to dig deeper.

Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers

The team published the results of its investigation in Scientometrics in February 1 , examining dozens of cases of apparent plagiarism in peer-review reports, identifying the use of identical phrases across reports prepared for 19 journals. The team discovered exact quotes duplicated across 50 publications, saying that the findings are just “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to misconduct in the peer-review system.

Dorothy Bishop, a former neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, who has turned her attention to investigating research misconduct, was “favourably impressed” by the team’s analysis. “I felt the way they approached it was quite useful and might be a guide for other people trying to pin this stuff down,” she says.

Peer review under review

Piniewski and his colleagues conducted three analyses. First, they uploaded five peer-review reports from the two manuscripts that his laboratory had submitted to a rudimentary online plagiarism-detection tool . The reports had 44–100% similarity to previously published online content. Links were provided to the sources in which duplications were found.

The researchers drilled down further. They broke one of the suspicious peer-review reports down to fragments of one to three sentences each and searched for them on Google. In seconds, the search engine returned a number of hits: the exact phrases appeared in 22 open peer-review reports, published between 2021 and 2023.

The final analysis provided the most worrying results. They took a single quote — 43 words long and featuring multiple language errors, including incorrect capitalization — and pasted it into Google. The search revealed that the quote, or variants of it, had been used in 50 peer-review reports.

Predominantly, these reports were from journals published by MDPI, PLOS and Elsevier, and the team found that the amount of duplication increased year-on-year between 2021 and 2023. Whether this is because of an increase in the number of open-access peer-review reports during this time or an indication of a growing problem is unclear — but Piniewski thinks that it could be a little bit of both.

Why would a peer reviewer use plagiarized text in their report? The team says that some might be attempting to save time , whereas others could be motivated by a lack of confidence in their writing ability, for example, if they aren’t fluent in English.

The team notes that there are instances that might not represent misconduct. “A tolerable rephrasing of your own words from a different review? I think that’s fine,” says Piniewski. “But I imagine that most of these cases we found are actually something else.”

The source of the problem

Duplication and manipulation of peer-review reports is not a new phenomenon. “I think it’s now increasingly recognized that the manipulation of the peer-review process, which was recognized around 2010, was probably an indication of paper mills operating at that point,” says Jennifer Byrne, director of biobanking at New South Wales Health in Sydney, Australia, who also studies research integrity in scientific literature.

Paper mills — organizations that churn out fake research papers and sell authorships to turn a profit — have been known to tamper with reviews to push manuscripts through to publication, says Byrne.

The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science

However, when Bishop looked at Piniewski’s case, she could not find any overt evidence of paper-mill activity. Rather, she suspects that journal editors might be involved in cases of peer-review-report duplication and suggests studying the track records of those who’ve allowed inadequate or plagiarized reports to proliferate.

Piniewski’s team is also concerned about the rise of duplications as generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes easier to access . Although his team didn’t look for signs of AI use, its ability to quickly ingest and rephrase large swathes of text is seen as an emerging issue.

A preprint posted in March 2 showed evidence of researchers using AI chatbots to assist with peer review, identifying specific adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports .

Bishop isn’t as concerned as Piniewski about AI-generated reports, saying that it’s easy to distinguish between AI-generated text and legitimate reviewer commentary. “The beautiful thing about peer review,” she says, is that it is “one thing you couldn’t do a credible job with AI”.

Preventing plagiarism

Publishers seem to be taking action. Bethany Baker, a media-relations manager at PLOS, who is based in Cambridge, UK, told Nature Index that the PLOS Publication Ethics team “is investigating the concerns raised in the Scientometrics article about potential plagiarism in peer reviews”.

How big is science’s fake-paper problem?

An Elsevier representative told Nature Index that the publisher “can confirm that this matter has been brought to our attention and we are conducting an investigation”.

In a statement, the MDPI Research Integrity and Publication Ethics Team said that it has been made aware of potential misconduct by reviewers in its journals and is “actively addressing and investigating this issue”. It did not confirm whether this was related to the Scientometrics article.

One proposed solution to the problem is ensuring that all submitted reviews are checked using plagiarism-detection software. In 2022, exploratory work by Adam Day, a data scientist at Sage Publications, based in Thousand Oaks, California, identified duplicated text in peer-review reports that might be suggestive of paper-mill activity. Day offered a similar solution of using anti-plagiarism software , such as Turnitin.

Piniewski expects the problem to get worse in the coming years, but he hasn’t received any unusual peer-review reports since those that originally sparked his research. Still, he says that he’s now even more vigilant. “If something unusual occurs, I will spot it.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01312-0

Piniewski, M., Jarić, I., Koutsoyiannis, D. & Kundzewicz, Z. W. Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04960-1 (2024).

Article   Google Scholar  

Liang, W. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.07183 (2024).

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