How does media reflect the OA and non-OA scientific literature? A case study of environment sustainability

Abstract

News outlets and popular science magazines have played an important role in increasing the public’s knowledge, engagement with and understanding of global environmental issues in recent years. Increased access to scholarly outputs might foster a culture of greater scientific education, which in turn could have a direct impact on public policy. This paper aimed to study: (i) Which topics in the area of environmental sustainability have been communicated to the members of the public via News and Popular Science articles. (ii) If these topics were also found in OA and Non-OA scientific articles. Three data sets comprising documents published between 2014 and 2018 were obtained from ProQuest and Scopus databases. Our findings showed four topics have been communicated to the general public via News and Popular Science articles. ‘Environmental protection’ and ‘Socio-economic aspects of environmental sustainability’ were the common topics amongst OA, Non-OA and News and Popular Science articles. Although the three sets had two topics in common, they placed different levels of importance on different topics. In the OA set ‘Biodiversity management & wildlife conservation’ and ‘Sustainable agriculture’ were regarded as motor topics. In the News and Popular Science set, ‘Environmental policy’ appeared as a well-developed and motor topic.