Research Groups in Spain Studying the Public Communication of Science

Abstract

This study investigates the state of the art of the Spanish research on the public communication of science, with the aim of identifying the current research groups in this field and characterise them. To do this, a twofold methodology was implemented: a content analysis of the information contained in the websites of the 91 universities in Spain, and 21 semi-structured interviews with science communication researchers. The results show that the public communication of science is a developing field of research in Spain. At least 47 groups study this issue, either as its only research focus (n=7) or together with other fields (n=40). These groups are distributed across 15 from the 17 Spanish regions (also called “autonomous communities”). They belong to a variety of university departments and disciplines: Communication/Journalism (50.0%), Philosophy (15.9%), Medicine and life sciences (9.1%), Humanities and social sciences (6.8%), Education (4.5%), History of science (4.5%), Sociology (4.5%) and Philology (2.3%). The research groups depend mostly on national grants for funding. They also report unevenly distributed collaboration networks. The main research lines and shortcomings in this sector are also identified.