Everyday new research papers are being published and sometimes they get some media coverage. A very few researches get a lot of attention but than things can go wrong, take for example the research that described a link between music and violence.
And than comes websites like Sense about Science in doing a great job.
What is the purpose of this site?
- Make sense of science and evidence
- Provide quick help and advice
- Make a fuss about things that are wrong
- Represent the public interest in sound science
- Activate networks of scientists and others in defence of evidence
With a database of over 5,000 scientists, from Nobel prize winners to postdocs and PhD students, they work in partnership with scientific bodies, research publishers, policy makers, the public and the media, to change public discussions about science and evidence.
A recent example is all about the idea if “TV turns kids into monsters”, something The Telegraph and The Daily Express made of a study published in Archives of Disease in Childhood.
The great thing of Sense about Science is that they contact the researcher (or other researchers) to verify:
Dr Alison Parkes of the Medical Research Council’s Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow and author of the study, explains here that the small rise in misconduct that was observed in children who watch more than three hours of television a day was too weak a link to be meaningful:
“If we had been able to control for more family influences then we may not have found any effect at all. We can put the case for this actually being a null finding, and we cannot really point to a cause-and-effect either – we have only found an association”. (source)
Btw, PhD-comics summed up which research can attract the most attention:
