Or should that be a pixel!
If you want a brief but mind-boggling, diversion from the tedium of your day then look no further than ‘internet live stats’ which shows the number of website, blogs, tweets and other social media stuff being created every second of every day.
Into this miasma do our scientists, research teams and science communications pros send yet more innocent websites to be lost in the surf for ever I fear.
Of the last five research proposals I have reviewed, all have proposed creating a new website as part of their dissemination strategy. There it sat, alongside promises to publish in an academic journal and visits to international conferences in far flung places; supposedly accessible but similarly lacking in impact on the wider public consciousness.
Fact is many, many websites never get visited. Or last about as long as it takes to create one. Only yesterday I was taken to a website that looked exactly the thing I needed. I was disappointed to find it was last updated three years ago.
What was even more surprising was the amount that people are willing to spend on these things. The bottom of the range was £2000. At the top was a website build, priced at £15,000. That’s the price of a second-hand family car. Actually, you could get 15 second-hand family cars for that amount where I live!
It is the singularity of purpose behind these websites that will defeat most of them from the outset. On their own, they amount to little. As part of something else, as a page or inventive piece of media on a bigger website, they could perhaps have a wider reach.
The underlying issue is that the author(s) of such proposals are not taking that first, most important, step and thinking about the audience they are trying to reach. Only when you are clear about your audience and its preferences can you make a sound decision on how to communicate with them (including online).
And why should they given it is not their discipline? So, I do wonder how often communications professionals are asked to look at the research proposals. And if they are, whether they are doing a good enough job of advising their colleagues. From my experience as a review, you can soon tell the ones where such a discussion has happened.
In a strange way, what’s so disappointing about this trend is that great science is letting itself down at the final hurdle with an unimaginative knee-jerk response to the task of dissemination. Or perhaps is it that the public is being let down by great science being poorly communicated?
One can understand the allure of the web as the easy answer to this thing called communication. However, I am struck by this paragraph in the recent Public Attitudes to Science report It indicates a thirst for something more direct, more meaningful in their interaction with scientists:
People especially want to hear directly from scientists. Six-in-ten (58%) think that scientists currently put too little effort into informing the public about their work, while five-in-ten (53%) think that scientists should be rewarded for doing so. Seven-in-ten (68%) would particularly like scientists to talk more about the social and ethical implications of their research.
Night, night.
Simon Denegri's Lay Review 
Good points. I think part of the problem is that there aren’t enough communication professionals within many academic organisations, and researchers don’t know what the different options are (beyond the standard peer-reviewed journal article, conference presentation, press release and website). The incentives for researchers to communicate their research could also be improved…
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I absolutely agree that the default, knee-jerk ‘ let’s put it on (our/a) website without stopping to think how far that will actually get us’ response has become a dangerous trend in getting information to the public, especially in the increasingly cash and human-resource poor public sector.
However there is a more fundamental problem i.e. how much clinical research still rides along on its own, discrete, unknown, even more hidden from view than other NHS Information highway, wholly or largely detached from the health organisation where the clinical activity and the research action happens, and from whatever communications and public interface it may have to offer (and it may not have much at the moment – which brings its own problems, though if partnership working was taken seriously there could be financial and resource benefits that could offer a solution to those). Should we not be prioritizing building strong bridges at every level across the divide which has the clinical research world on one side and NHS commissioners and providers on the other. If we are really serious about bringing clinical research participation and involvement out of its closet do we not need to look seriously at a much closer relationship? At making and building strong connections between the business of clinical research and everyday clinical encounter in the places where patients actually access services,between the development of participation and involvement in research and the strategic planning and development of that public interface and involvement in those same places? I fear that while we ignore the gaping chasm between the world of clinical research and the rest of the NHS, which is where the people are who need to be reached, we will not really make the breakthroughs that are needed.
While I agree that Simon is right in what he says here, are we straining and gnats whilst swallowing camels?
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Really enjoyed your insight and comment. Yes, I am railing at a symptom most definitely, which has deeper causes. Ultimately I think there’s a lot of research being done which is self-serving and where the benefits to patient health would seem marginal.
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I kind of disagree with you Simon about the explosion of websites and I can understand researcher’s confusion about the cost of commissioning project websites.
‘Pools and puddles’ is the phrase that comes to mind. Some people argue that blogging is over because there is just too much of it, whilst others say that there will always be a reader for your particular ‘pool’ or ‘puddle’ of knowledge.
I sit in the puddle camp and believe that like a desk, laptop or filing cabinet, a website or blog is a basic requirement to put the ‘stuff’ for an integrated communication strategy.
The key words are however, integrated communication strategy. A website on its own is only a place to put stuff. Researchers need to think much harder about what else to do, to communicate their messages.
I was directly employed (too late in the process it transpired) to work on a European funded research project which deliberately set out to increase engagement between the researchers and the multitude of the potential publics. The post came about because we examined the papers published in academic journals from a similar, previous EU funded project. Top articles in the Lancet get 240-1075 citations typically. From this project, 15 papers were published, resulting in a mere 42 citations in low impact journals. We found that there had been no co-ordinated publication strategy and papers took up to five years to appear.
EU is keen that research is disseminated better, so following the publication: ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ssh/docs/guide-communicating-research_en.pdf we wrote an integrated communications strategy for the new project and set out to try to implement it.
Boy was it difficult!
The key thing we missed out was involving policy makers early in the research process. If research is to have any impact, then the people who are going to implement the findings need to be involved.
There were lots of other obstacles I can describe if anyone is interested, but overall, if research is going to get anywhere, researchers need to think about who they are researching for and how to work with them at the design stage.
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