University of Michigan School of Information assistant professor Misha Teplitskiy and associate professor David Jurgens have published new work examining the quality of coverage researchers with ethnic names receive from U.S media outlets. 

Their paper, “Author mentions in science news reveal widespread disparities across name-inferred ethnicities” draws on a study of 223,587 science news stories and considers how science gets translated into the news. Northwestern University postdoctoral fellow Hao Peng is the first author on the paper. 

Media outlets, Teplitskiy and Jurgens says, play a pivotal role in disseminating scientific knowledge to the public. Further, media coverage raises the reputation of the researcher, elevating their work and helping them boost their career and future research opportunities. It also affects the public understanding of who scientists are. 

With all this at stake, it is critical researchers are identified by name in media coverage. But Peng, Teplitskiy and Jurgens’ paper identifies an acute difference between authors with non-anglo names and authors with anglo names. 

“Our work is showing there is real disparity in terms of who gets named based on a perception of their ethnicity,” Jurgens says. “People talk about the leaky pipeline in science and how there’s decreased diversity in each step. And journalistic coverage of science is the primary way the general public discovers research findings. 

It’s a question of relevancy, importance and who gets to be named and there’s a disproportionate elevation of Anglo-names.” 

The researchers also found that among US-based authors, journalists more often use authors’ institutions instead of their names when referring to non-Anglo-named authors. 

“We’re looking at the quality of the coverage,” Teplitskiy says. “That’s the novel angle. Because I would have expected disparities in how often journalists cover work authored by someone with a non-Anglo name, but once a reporter decides to work on a story, I personally didn’t expect disparities based on names. That was surprising.” 

Teplitskiy’s research assesses the role institutions and technology play in scientific discovery. His current research investigates how individuals and organizations assess creative ideas and how knowledge flows between scientists. 

Jurgens’ is a computational social scientist who examines the relationship between natural language processing and data science to better predict how humans behave in large social systems. His current research focuses on who communicates online, how they communicate and how we can better understand our relationships with the online world. 

“Author mentions in science news reveal widespread disparities across name-inferred ethnicities” is authored by Hao Peng, Misha Teplitskiy and David Jurgens. It was published in Quantitative Science Studies. 

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Learn more about University of Michigan School of Information assistant professors Misha Teplitskiy and David Jurgens by visiting their UMSI faculty profiles.