While I am busy with creating further visual content that is related to science and have been starting to put out some of my creations, I still wanted to continue my research about the world of science communication. From an exercise in the design and research class, I came up with a number of relevant key words for my research which I wanted to explore further. And one term in particular has crossed my path in both the research process and in “real life”, which is why I would like to dedicate this blogpost to the topic of dissemination. In the world of science, dissemination is a term that one will frequently come across – and one that I would define as closely related to the field of science communication.
Dissemination in the context of science essentially means transferring knowledge to a targeted audience because that audience will either use it, be impacted by it or influence the use of the evidence. In short: dissemination is all about getting information to the right people so that they can make use of that knowledge. To name one example – knowledge that concerns health care could be communicated to policy makers, patients or healthcare practitioners. It is a core component in translating knowledge strategically in order to adopt and implement new practices.
There are various frameworks and translation models that include elements of dissemination, however, dissemination is often regarded as a single step at some point towards the end of a research project rather than spanning over its entire running time which in turn contributes to a translational gap between what is evidence is being generated and what actually impacts policies and practices. This furthermore has also the potential to represent poor return on investment to research funders.
Dissemination is a complex topic that demands strategic use and while many models exist, researchers struggle to select the fitting resources for their dissemination strategy and lack guidance in terms of which activities to implement at the subsequent steps of the dissemination process.
So, to sum up: while there are strategies and models, implementing them effectively poses a big challenge, which is why it would be important to develop a framework that is accessible and clear to everyone.
While my previous posts and my general approach was more on the non-scientific community as a target group for my topic and also the little projects I have been working on, it was quite interesting to see that proper science communication is a struggle that is not only related to (public) education but maybe even more relevant for the scientific community, incredibly important in order to translate scientific findings for decision makers or audiences that concretely benefit from certain knowledge.
While communication to the public and offering ways of easily accessible information that are intended to raise the overall knowledge within the population is a large part of what caught my interest in the matter and is also something I want to pursue further, the importance of that other side of science communication was not as evident to me before.
Therefore, I think it could be interesting to also follow the topic from this other side. To look at the ways scientists currently frame and communicate their work to respective target groups and then find the issues and new (design supported) approaches to make for better knowledge transfer.
The way of communication research has been changing, especially due to digital possibilities.
And while traditional formats such as scholarly journals and books can be found online, their functions and formats have remained similar throughout that time of change.
Therefore, online media such as blogs and social media platforms offer new possibilities for scientists to use. Blogs and wikis have risen to popularity with something called „open notebook science“, professional academic networks like ResearchGate or Academia.edu have millions of users, and for interaction with the wider public, online formats such as TED talks that are being streamed via YouTube have become very popular.
Digital technologies allow scientists to not only communicate with their primary dissemination targets (such as other scholars, policy makers or similar) but to actively involve people that otherwise would not have had access to this information.
The potential of adopting new methods is promising, as new cross-disciplinary collaborations could emerge which in turn could support publications, funding and new research opportunities.
Overall, there has been a noticeable push towards making science and research known to the greater public since the 1980s and the inclusion of non-scientific audiences which in turn has caused new forms of dissemination to emerge. Examples for this would be sciences shows or magazines and in more recent years, new event types such as science slams or open lab days. New participatory spaces such as science cafés or hackerspaces emerged which influence both research production and dissemination processes, and powerful trends that strive for the globalization of research, responsible research, and inclusion of previously excluded audiences are reshaping the scope and purposes of dissemination.
The issue here is, that while these new emerging approaches are viewed as fundamental constituents of open science, researchers tend to still focus on traditional outputs such as journal articles, speaking at conferences or publishing books.
Innovative dissemination would, in turn, mean dissemination that exceeds traditional academic publishing and meeting practices and aims to spread the research findings to a more widespread audience.
I feel like this is the part I would like to find out more about in the future because that is also where the power of (media) design can play a vital role.
For the next blogpost, I plan on diving a little bit deeper into (innovative) dissemination practices in order to find out more about the possibilities and challenges in that regard.
Sources used in this blogpost:
First part: Scott, Sion, Bethany Atkins, Thomas D’Costa, Claire Rendle, Katherine Murphy, David Taylor, Caroline Smith, Ian Kellar, Andrew Briggs, Alys Griffiths, Rebekah Hornak, Anne Spinewine, Wade Thompson, Ross Tsuyuki, and Debi Bhattacharya. “Development of the Guide to Disseminating Research (GuiDiR): A Consolidated Framework.” Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy 20, no. 11 (2024): 1047–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sapharm.2024.07.007.
Second part: Ross-Hellauer, Tony, Jonathan P. Tennant, Viltė Banelytė, Edit Gorogh, Daniela Luzi, Peter Kraker, Lucio Pisacane, Roberta Ruggieri, Electra Sifacaki, and Michela Vignoli. “Ten Simple Rules for Innovative Dissemination of Research.” PLOS Computational Biology 16, no. 4 (2020): e1007704. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007704.
