NI has an editorial on hyping research
Although these attention-grabbing headlines might help sell papers and increase traffic to newspaper websites, such reporting is irresponsible to the public and to science in general. Even if the article itself is more balanced, it must be remembered that many readers never get much beyond the headline. The net result is the public comes away with much misinformation.
So far this topic was more found at blogs than in peer-reviewed journals – my gratulations to NI.
Maybe there are two different scenarios that should be discriminated – controlled information: everything that a press department sends the author for review and uncontrolled information: everything a journalist regards as being news worthy. Any complains about the last issue are useless…
The big issue, however, is what happens with controlled information that is intentionally misleading – the Darwinius masillae story mentioned by NI or the ORMDL3 story that I highlighted earlier. Does anyone care for that? All experienced resaerchers know that the initial marketing of a paper is being important to get high citation rates afterwards, yea, yea.