News coverage in the US of scientific work is biased against researchers whose names aren鈥檛 of聽British origin.
Hao Peng at the University of聽Michigan and his colleagues analysed more than 230,000 news聽stories from 288 US outlets, which reported on around 100,000 different research papers聽across all scientific fields.
The team looked at whether the聽first authors of papers were mentioned in news coverage. Very聽often, these are junior researchers who have contributed most significantly to the work. Peng and his colleagues found that聽first authors who had names that weren鈥檛 of British origin were significantly less likely to be mentioned or quoted than first authors with names that were.
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On average, the probability of featuring in a news article was up to 6.4 per cent less for researchers with names of non-British origin. The greatest decreases were for people with names of Asian or African origin compared with those whose names were of European origin. The greatest disparity was seen in general news聽outlets, such as certain newspapers, where researchers with names of African and Chinese origin were 10 per cent聽less likely to be mentioned.
To perform the analysis, the team used Altmetric, a database that aggregates media and online coverage of scientific papers.
鈥淢ost people who work in聽journalism have personal anecdotes that support these findings,鈥� says Marcus Ryder at Birmingham City University, UK. 鈥淭here is no doubt that the media confers legitimacy and authority to deciding who the voices we should be listening to are.鈥�
When examining possible factors contributing to the bias, the team found that geographical location was a major component, but that this alone didn鈥檛 account for the disparity. Authors with names not of British origin based outside the US were even less likely to be mentioned, potentially because of perceived difficulties in interviewing them due to time-zone or language-fluency issues, according to the study.
鈥淸Media coverage] not only affects public perception about who is a scientist, it also affects new scientists when they enter the academic world 鈥� who they choose to be advised by, who they choose to collaborate with,鈥� says Peng.
The researchers noted a small, gradual increase in the number of聽times scientists with names of Chinese or Indian origin, as well as聽those in languages derived from Latin, were mentioned. They predict that scientists in these groups may reach parity with colleagues who have names of British origin in five to 12 years, but that the gap will persist for other minority ethnicity authors.
The team also found a gender imbalance across the news coverage, but it reflected existing disparities between the numbers of male and female researchers in聽those scientific fields.
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