The Scientific Evidence Indicator for Popular Science News
This addresses the challenge of improving science literacy and trust in media for general audiences, particularly high school students, but is incremental as it applies existing assessment criteria in a new communication context.
The paper tackles the problem of assessing and communicating the credibility of scientific sources in medical news to non-experts, resulting in the Science Evidence Indicator (SEI) project that provides transparent assessments for high school students.
To what extent can news media help in providing more credible information about science? This is the core challenge for the Science Evidence Indicator (SEI) project, a collaboration between the Danish popular news website videnskab.dk and the authors of this paper. Looking specifically at medical science news, we aim to provide a transparent assessment of the scientific sources behind a story. This entails identifying some of the criteria that scientists use to assess research, and making it accessible and understandable for readers. We address the following research question: How can we communicate the quality of scientific publications in health science to a non-expert audience? Our goal is to make the assessments understandable for the youngest part of the website's target audience: high school students from age 16 and upwards.