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In this age of misinformation, it is not uncommon for social media users – including the US president – to blame journalists for doing bad work. Unfortunately, with regard to the coverage of scientific studies in particular, these charges are true. Scientific writers sometimes exaggerate claims based on research findings. Only one Twitter account now exists solely to highlight a particular variety of these misleading stories.
The account @justsaysinmice tweets about stories that rely on a mouse study to make claims about human health. It's been around for less than a month and has only released seven tweets to date. It already has 24,600 subscribers (compared to 21,500 when I started writing this story). The scientist who manages this feed, James Heathers, has his own Twitter account, @jamesheathers, which has only about 5,100 subscribers, although it has been since September 2011 and has published more than 3,000 tweets.
Heathers is, according to his personal website, an Australian researcher from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works in the computational behavioral science laboratory. "I like the methodology," he writes. "I'm developing new data analysis techniques in the biological and social sciences and then talking about them compulsively."
Maybe that's what inspired him to create the Just Says in Mice account. In any case, it seems to answer a need, based on the speed with which it gathers followers and on the concerns expressed by other researchers and academics.
"Let me start with a bold assertion: a major problem facing science journalists is that they have trouble communicating what is true," wrote Sharon Dunwoody, emeritus professor Evjue-Bascom at the # 39, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism, on Sci Dev Net. She says that journalists simply do not know enough about all the different research they have to cover to fully explain the implications, and suggests that writers should be interested in writing about the weight of evidence rather than deciding whether a scientific statement particular is true. Journalists, she says, should show both their support and their opposition to a particular assumption, leaving the ultimate judgment to the reader.
For journalists, of course, it's not just the pressure to understand the story, get the facts, and work in tight deadlines. Writers and editors must also make scientific stories relevant to readers. This need gives rise to the kind of exalted affirmations on which Heathers expresses it in Just Says in Mice. Readers may not be interested in discovering that a particular development, which seems to affect rodents, is actually years away from the human research phase and even further away from clinical use. Thus, although these facts may well be revealed in a story, titles written to attract readers often do not make this distinction essential.
But if Just Says in Mice does not publish enough major publications with its damning tweets and has been as popular over time as it has been in its brief period since its inception, we might soon see the word "mouse" in many scientific titles. And you will know why.
Regarding Quartz, know that journalists have long been warned that the limits of scientific studies are limited and that mice are in our headlines.
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