Is the Brazilian fauna well represented on children's books?

This paper examine children books about Brazilian fauna, especially those whose content reveals a potential for science communication. The research was conducted in Brazilian publishers, bookstores and in the Google search engine for books, using the keywords “animals”, “Brazilian animals” and “national fauna”. The content and descriptive analysis was performed in 24 books that presentedwild animals in their natural habitat and portrayed realistically to verify the strategies used in the dissemination of animal biology, focusing on language, content and images.There is a significant number of books about Brazilian animals for children (199), but few are available for purchase (61). Only seven were considered adequate to disseminate animal science, indicating that few books associate scientific knowledge with quality text, bringing together information and aesthetics of the word, as well as beautiful and attractive illustrations. However, all titles play an important role in the popularization of native species

A televisão contribuindo para a história das doenças

Este trabalho analisa como a Aids foi divulgada pelo programa "Fantástico", da Rede Globo de televisão, entre 1983 e 1992. A televisão desempenhou papel chave ao apresentar a doença ao público, muito antes que os governos, profissionais da saúde, e pesquisadores, tivessem respostas seguras sobre a doença. Foram analisados 26 programas. A Aids encontrou espaço reservado no "Fantástico", que priorizou seus aspectos trágicos, misteriosos, desconhecidos, fatais e anormais, em um primeiro momento, e de esperança, denúncia e alerta, para não tornar-se mais amena e informativa, sem deixar de tocar a emoção do telespectador. Essa estratégia gerou distanciamento entre público e informação

As relações entre ciência e cultura: vinte anos da espiral da cultura científica

The interaction between different social actors who produce and consume scientific information, encode and decode these languages to make communication effective, in addition to the specificities of these relationships, are represented in the Spiral of Scientific Culture, a science communication model that linguist Carlos Vogt developed 20 years ago. Rethinking the spiral from the emergence of Covid-19, a new respiratory disease causing a global public health crisis, makes us think about the relevance of the circulation of scientific information in the public sphere, and also about the way knowledge has been appropriated and has been continuously developed between science and society. Vogt has been working for three decades promoting science communication in Brazil. At his 80th birthday, celebrated in February this year, he has been tireless to work on ambitious and pioneering projects aimed at expanding public access to scientific knowledge. In this interview, Vogt takes up the concept of the Spiral of Scientific Culture in light of the new connections established between science and society within the pandemic landscape, when there was an expansion of public access to scientific information.A interação entre os diferentes atores sociais que produzem e consomem a informação científica, que codificam e decodificam essas linguagens para que a comunicação seja efetiva, além das especificidades dessas relações, estão representadas na Espiral da Cultura Científica, um modelo de comunicação da ciência desenvolvido pelo linguista Carlos Vogt há 20 anos. Repensar a espiral a partir da emergência de uma nova doença respiratória causadora de uma crise de saúde pública mundial nos faz refletir sobre a relevância, não só da circulação das informações científicas na esfera pública, mas também do modo com que se deu a apropriação desse conhecimento e seu desenvolvimento contínuo a partir de interações ciência e sociedade. Vogt atua há três décadas fomentando a Divulgação Científica no Brasil. Aos 80 anos completados em fevereiro deste ano, ele tem sido incansável em projetos ambiciosos e pioneiros voltados para ampliar o acesso público ao conhecimento científico. Nesta entrevista, Vogt retoma o conceito da Espiral da Cultura Científica à luz das novas conexões estabelecidas entre ciência e sociedade com a pandemia de Covid-19 quando houve uma ampliação ao acesso público ao conhecimento científico

Fauna brasileira retratada na literatura infantil: instrumento para a divulgação científica

Acredita-se que, quando bem estruturados, os livros infantis podem ser excelentes aliados na divulgação da ciência. Eles podem influenciar desde cedo a conscientização desse público em relação ao tema, favorecendo a popularização científica e a consolidação de uma cultura científica na sociedade. A leitura é um convite para a criança pensar e fazer novas perguntas, logo, um livro de divulgação científica para crianças não deve ser um tratado sobre um tema científico nem um livro de estudo. A criança não deve se sentir obrigada a ler, mas sim cativada. Esta pesquisa é parte da dissertação de mestrado em Divulgação Científica e Cultural do Laboratório de Estudos Avançados em Jornalismo da Universidade Estadual de Campinas, e tem como objetivo discutir a literatura infantil como um instrumento para a divulgação da ciência a partir de um levantamento de livros que articulem conhecimentos científicos sobre os animais para o público infantil. Com um referencial teórico e sólido sobre a literatura infantil como ferramenta para a divulgação da ciência, propõe ainda a validação do livro Mami o quê? - um livro infantil e interativo sobre os mamíferos brasileiros - através de um estudo de recepção com o público de interesse, sobre os conteúdos e imagens veiculados ao livro. Apresentamos nesse artigo, o livro e os primeiros resultados da validação do mesmo com crianças da pré-escola do Centro de Convivência Infantil – CECI - da Unicamp, através da metodologia de observação participante

Ten Years of Altmetrics: A Review of Latin America Contributions

Altmetrics studies emerged ten years ago in the Global North context and after a few years spread around the world. The paper investigates who are the Latin American researchers, which topics are covered and the relationship between South and North in Altmetric Studies. This study combines global mapping, social networks analysis and Content Analysis, using Dimensions, VOSviewer and Iramuteq to measure co-authorship, bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis and content analysis to identify topics and types of production in Latina America outputs on alternative metrics. Results (n=172) show the prominence of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico in altmetric research in Latin America. There is an internal national co-authorship, with a huge influence from the North as reference to Latin American altmetric studies, but with gradual recognition of Mexico and Brazil as leading exponents in the region. We identify main topics related to local issues and regional impacts and discussions about the social role of the university. We conclude that the landscape of science output on altmetrics is becoming multipolar. Latin America emerged as an alternative hub of altmetric studies, but it still depends on references and collaboration with central countries. We also observed an emerging discussion on critics about low covering of regional data and an innovative development of methodologies and technologies as alternatives to commercial platforms that provide data to evaluate the social impact of universities. Latin America altmetric community should invest in resources to strengthen regional collaboration

Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Science research [version 1; peer review: 4 approved]

Science journalists are uniquely positioned to increase the societal impact of open science by contextualizing and communicating research findings in ways that highlight their relevance and implications for non-specialist audiences. Through engagement with and coverage of open research outputs, journalists can help align the ideals of openness, transparency, and accountability with the wider public sphere and its democratic potential. Yet, it is unclear to what degree journalists use open research outputs in their reporting, what factors motivate or constrain this use, and how the recent surge in openly available research seen during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the relationship between open science and science journalism. This literature review thus examines journalists’ use of open research outputs, specifically open access publications and preprints. We focus on literature published from 2018 onwards—particularly literature relating to the COVID-19 pandemic—but also include seminal articles outside the search dates. We find that, despite journalists’ potential to act as critical brokers of open access knowledge, their use of open research outputs is hampered by an overreliance on traditional criteria for evaluating scientific quality; concerns about the trustworthiness of open research outputs; and challenges using and verifying the findings. We also find that, while the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged journalists to explore open research outputs such as preprints, the extent to which these explorations will become established journalistic practices remains unclear. Furthermore, we note that current research is overwhelmingly authored and focused on the Global North, and the United States specifically. Finally, given the dearth of research in this area, we conclude with recommendations for future research that attend to issues of equity and diversity, and more explicitly examine the intersections of open science and science journalism

Pandem-icons — exploring the characteristics of highly visible scientists during the Covid-19 pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic escalated demand for scientific explanations and guidance, creating opportunities for scientists to become publicly visible. In this study, we compared characteristics of visible scientists during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic (January to December 2020) across 16 countries. We find that the scientists who became visible largely matched socio-cultural criteria that have characterised visible scientists in the past (e.g., age, gender, credibility, public image, involvement in controversies). However, there were limited tendencies that scientists commented outside their areas of expertise. We conclude that the unusual circumstances created by Covid-19 did not change the phenomenon of visible scientists in significant way

Local Chatter or International Buzz? Language Differences on Posts about Zika Research on Twitter and Facebook

Background When the Zika virus outbreak became a global health emergency in early 2016, the scientific community responded with an increased output of Zika-related research. This upsurge in research naturally made its way into academic journals along with editorials, news, and reports. However, it is not yet known how or whether these scholarly communications were distributed to the populations most affected by Zika. Methodology/Principal findings To understand how scientific outputs about Zika reached global and local audiences, we collected Tweets and Facebook posts that linked to Zika-related research in the first six months of 2016. Using a language detection algorithm, we found that up to 90% of Twitter and 76% of Facebook posts are in English. However, when none of the authors of the scholarly article are from English-speaking countries, posts on both social media are less likely to be in English. The effect is most pronounced on Facebook, where the likelihood of posting in English is between 11 and 16% lower when none of the authors are from English-speaking countries, as compared to when some or all are. Similarly, posts about papers written with a Brazilian author are 13% more likely to be in Portuguese on Facebook than when made on Twitter. Conclusions/Significance Our main conclusion is that scholarly communication on Twitter and Facebook of Zikarelated research is dominated by English, despite Brazil being the epicenter of the Zika epidemic. This result suggests that scholarly findings about the Zika virus are unlikely to be distributed directly to relevant populations through these popular online mediums. Nevertheless, there are differences between platforms. Compared to Twitter, scholarly communication on Facebook is more likely to be in the language of an author’s country. The Zika outbreak provides a useful case-study for understanding how scientific outputs are communicated to relevant populations. Our results suggest that Facebook is a more effective channel than Twitter, if communication is desired to be in the native language of the affected country. Further research should explore how local media—such as governmental websites, newspapers and magazines, as well as television and radio—disseminate scholarly publication

More relevant alternative metrics for Latin America

As métricas alternativas têm sido utilizadas como complemento às métricas tradicionais, funcionando como ferramentas para rastrear os usos e a atenção social a publicações científicas no ambiente online. As revistas científicas de acesso aberto têm, potencialmente, maior chance de serem compartilhadas e lidas pelo público nas redes sociais. Nesse cenário, a produção científica do Brasil e da América Latina, a exemplo daquelas indexadas no SciELO, que reúne revistas científicas relevantes e de acesso aberto da região, poderiam se beneficiar da altmetria. No entanto, análises sobre a representatividade de países, idiomas e áreas do conhecimento na altmetria revelam que é preciso aperfeiçoar os indicadores para que valorizem a ciência publicada por países em desenvolvimento, de língua não inglesa, de acesso aberto e relevância nacional ou regional. Tendo isso como base, este paper aponta limitações da altmetria para a ciência praticada na América Latina, tomando como análise o comportamento de uso de redes sociais de acadêmicos e sociedade em geral, a presença de diferentes idiomas para compartilhar artigos de um mesmo tema, bem como os dados de plataformas que geram dados altmétricos, com enfoque para a provedora de dados inglesa Altmetric.com. A altmetria não tem sido capaz de retratar a atenção que artigos científicos brasileiros recebem nas redes sociais, apesar de haver esforços por parte das revistas em divulgação científica e do relativo engajamento social que conseguem mobilizar. É preciso ampliar a coleta de dados no Facebook, em português e espanhol, além de amplificar as coleções de blogs e veículos jornalísticos na região.31Alternative metrics have been used as a complement to traditional metrics as tools to track the uses and social attention to scientific publications in the online environment. Open access scientific journals are potentially more likely to be shared and read by the public on social media. In this scenario, the scientific output of Brazil and Latin America, like those indexed in the SciELO database, which brings together relevant and open access scientific journals from the region, could benefit from altmetrics. However, analyzes of the representativeness of countries, languages and fields of knowledge in altmetrics reveal that the indicators need to be improved to value science in developing, non-English speaking, open access countries and national or regional relevance. This paper points out the limitations of altmetrics for science in Latin America, by analyzing the social media behavior of scholars and society, the presence of different languages to share articles, as well as the data that generate altmetrics, such as the ones produced by the British data provider Altmetric.com. Altmetrics have not been able to portray the attention that Brazilian scientific papers have received in social media, despite the efforts made by journals to disseminate science and engage with the public. It is necessary to expand data collection on Facebook, of contents and channels in Portuguese and Spanish, as well as to expand data collection of blogs and news outlets in the region