Expert statements: Where science communication discourse meets peer review discourse
Vol.18,No.1(2025)
Discourse and Interaction
With the influx of scientific publications, journalists are often challenged in putting new research into context. The Science Media Centre (SMC) addresses this issue by publishing expert statements that review and explain new studies. As such, these statements combine elements of science communication discourse, which typically seeks wide outreach, and peer review discourse, which typically seeks privacy and anonymity. To explore how these two discourses with conflicting aims work together, this study examines all publications on the SMC UK from April 2002 to January 2024. It compares them through a keyword analysis to a corpus of academic press releases and open peer reviews. A sample of 23 articles is then analysed qualitatively using the popularization framework by Sterk and van Goch (2023). The results show the important role of the expert persona and the use of strong statements employing boosters and credibility evaluations while still adapting information to the audience. Expert statements thus bridge academic and media practices and allow experts to provide suggestions for society.
expert statement; science communication; peer review; keyword analysis; popularization
Marina Ivanova
Chemnitz University of Technology
Marina Ivanova is a researcher of English Linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. She specializes in language perception and production, corpus linguistics, and academic writing. She explores the language of science communication in the DAAD project “I, Expert: Media competence for science through linguistics” in cooperation with the University of Zaragoza (Spain), which aims to promote language awareness in science communication.
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