Media plays a big role in how citizens evaluate public health emergencies. This project seeks to understand how public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis are reported. In order to assess the polarization and politicization of U.S. news coverage, we are comparing news by political leaning (left, center, right) as segmented by AllSides media bias ratings. We…

Policy in areas such as conservation, energy, healthcare, and sustainable development is informed by a variety of factors, including the best available science. Determining the best available science requires synthesizing multiple scientific results to gauge both the level of scientific consensus and the reliability of the research. However, on some policy-relevant topics, syntheses continue…

Biased citation benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, making them more easily accepted. However, it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry. The need for a bias detection tool is evident from previous studies on citation bias, but existing work lacks crucial elements needed to scale the underlying approaches. This project will test the…

This project is intended to reduce the real and perceived danger to science and society when retracted research is mistakenly circulated within the digital scholarly record. The goal is to build more confidence in scientific discovery. Retraction alerts readers to unreliable scholarly material and is intended to remove that information from the citable record. Harm can result when faulty…

Scientific and technical information is often translated for the public, by knowledge brokers such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists, and public librarians. This project will research how knowledge brokers assess the quality of scientific and technical information and the implications for public access, information literacy, and understanding of science. The project will use case…