Communicating About Biorepository Research with Communities
Principles and approaches to communicating with a public audience
Written by the CHIRON Project Team
Published on July 9, 2024
Principles and approaches to communicating with a public audience
Written by the CHIRON Project Team
Published on July 9, 2024
The importance of effective public research communication can not be overstated. As Davies highlights, science communication is critical to the accountability and legitimacy of publicly funded science, serves important cultural roles, enhances democracies, and fulfills key economic purposes.¹ To this end, science communication is increasingly included as an essential component of undergraduate and graduate scientific training.² And, for those who missed such training or would benefit from a refresher, there are a number of outstanding publicly available toolkits for science communication; AAAS’s Communication Toolkit is a particularly rich resource.
The emphasis on and guidance around effective public research communication is particularly salient for researchers conducting biorepository-enabled, secondary data use investigations. Within biorepository research, it can be challenging to identify impacted communities—and harder still to connect with biorepository participants directly—so communication with a broader “public” is necessary. Further, communication about biorepository research does not be limited to sharing and discussing research findings—as the data are already collected, there is no risk of influencing the data by communication throughout the process of research—opening the door to myriad opportunities for engagement with shareholders.
Many authors have compiled principles to guide research communication. Contera highlights the importance of sharing not only the outcomes of your research but the origin story of your research questions, your own agenda and position in relation to the research questions, and exploring positive scenarios and unintended consequences of your work³—themes that have been rendered into practical guidance within the CHIRON toolkit (see Tools 1-2, 4, 9). The aforementioned AAAS Communication Toolkit includes a logic model for public engagement with science and tips for identifying audiences, tailoring messaging, and avoiding jargon.
Digital platforms are now established science communication tools. One of the challenges with drafting guidance for using digital platforms for public research communication is that almost as soon as the guidance is written it is out of date. With this in mind, AAAS’s 2018 Communication Toolkit includes a social media guide, which points to the work of Sara K. Yeo for principles to guide the use of social media for science communication, along with guidance on matching the goals of your communication to suitable online platforms. An additional resource within the toolkit is a guide to multimedia presentation, including visuals, video and podcasts. Other platforms to consider may include:
TikTok: this micro-video platform became an indispensable tool for science communication for many researchers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Radin and Light share their pointers for using TikTok for public research communication in this article.
Reddit: While data from this discussion platform fuels an active and diverse research community,4,5 researchers are also finding it a useful platform for community engagement. Researchers can use specific subreddits or Ask Me Anything (AMA) to discuss their findings. Disease or condition-specific subreddits can help target particular audiences. For instance, in r/endometriosis, a group of researchers led an “ask us anything” about endometriosis research that is one of the all-time top-performing posts in the subreddit.
Brownell SE, Price JV, Steinman L. Science Communication to the General Public: Why We Need to Teach Undergraduate and Graduate Students this Skill as Part of Their Formal Scientific Training. J Undergrad Neurosci Educ. 2013;12(1):E6-E10.