Public Understanding of Science Blog

By  Susan Howard. I’m writing this blog post as part of the journal’s 30-year anniversary, to give a glimpse behind the scenes of the editorial team: it’s part record, part nostalgia. I am a little taken aback to be writing that I have been the managing editor of PUS for 13 years, starting in the role in the spring of 2009. That’s a good portion of the journal’s history. I’ve watched it go from 6 issues per year to 8, from around a dozen submissions a month to 3 times that; seen production in the UK move to production in India; I’ve worked with three editors each based in a different country with different priorities and editorial styles. Susan Howard, Managing Editor of Public Understanding of Science Martin Bauer supervised my PhD (in stereotypical images of scientists) and we worked on several projects together. When I completed my thesis, very (very) certain that I didn’t want to and shouldn’t be an academic, and starting to train as a counsellor, I was casting around for a job...

Publishing in a prestigious international journal such as Public Understanding of Science and JCOM, Journal of Science Communication is indeed a desire of researchers in science communication around the globe. Less obvious, however, mainly for the enthusiastic new generation of young researchers, are the editors' choice criteria, and what can increase the chances of their papers get published. Having this in mind, we prepared a video, part of the series of “The science of science communication”, we invited Hans Peter Peters, editor-in-Chief of Public Understanding of Science, and Emma Weitkamp, editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Science Communication, to give us tips about getting published in those journals. The video was produced by the Brazilian Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology. Luisa Massarani

By Alberto Brodesco Lost in science   Before parachuting on the Island, Daniel Faraday was a professor of physics at Oxford. As it often happens in Lost , the name of the character alludes to a philosophical or scientific personality belonging to the past (including Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Rutherford and Minkowski), in this case to Michael Faraday (1791-1867), a leading scholar of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. In Because You Left (5×01), [1] Daniel Faraday has a fight with one of the series' main characters, the unruly Sawyer. Without providing clarifications, Faraday puts pressure on the group to quickly leave the beach. Sawyer does not trust him and asks for explanations. Faraday replies: “We really do not have time for me to try to explain. You have no idea how difficult that would be, for me to try to explain this... this phenomenon to a quantum physicist”. Sawyer, as is typical of the character, plays the part of the everyday man who does not accept to think ...

By Aviv J. Sharon, Jim Ryder, Jonathan Osborne, Esther Laslo & Hani Swirski Individuals need to be "science literate" to cope with many demands of everyday life, and much of their science literacy stems from what they learned at school. These are hardly new claims, neither in science education nor in science communication . Still, the term "science literacy" might sound old-fashioned to some readers, and even evoke associations of a top-down, paternalistic relationship between scientists and publics. In contrast, in science education and other “learning orientation” disciplines , the term “science literacy” is still used to describe the set of knowledge and competencies needed to engage with science. Perhaps it's time for some re-assessment? Arguably, scholars can help diverse individuals, publics and social groups apply scientific reasoning in everyday life, without being patronizing or treating people inequitably. People too might want to know abou...

By Noah Weeth Feinstein, Rainer Bromme, Sarit Barzilai, and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari Public engagement with science is widely perceived to be a source of many benefits to society, including benefits to the everyday decision making of its citizens, the quality of its democratic discourse, and the vitality of its scientific research institutions. Examples for such benefits would be the adherence to science based recommendations regarding nutrition or drug use, the willingness to accept scientific evidence in political debates about socio-scientific issues like climate change or the public appreciation of and interest in the work of scientists. In practice, people who promote and study public engagement with science rarely measure these outcomes directly. Instead, they rely on other indicators, e.g., participation measures, which may or may not be connected to the anticipated long-term benefits of public engagement with science. Even when there is no formal evaluation or official defini...