Is popular science in crisis?

In the last thirty years, interest in scientific popularization has decreased worryingly. Perhaps not unrelated to this is the loss of prestige of science, which the man in the street tends to consider guilty or accomplice in some threats, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the uncontrolled destruction of the environment or climate change.

During this time, several permanent sections of the media dedicated to popular scientific have disappeared, as well as a few important magazines, while books on popular science do not usually achieve great sales, with few exceptions, mainly related to health.

In the mass media, the only thing that matters now is the appeal of the headline, at the expense of scientific accuracy. Thus the effects of this type of dissemination are often negative and counterproductive: instead of informing, they distort the public opinion. I have spoken about the harmful effects of this type of disclosure in several posts in this blog.

Let us look at a few of the negative changes that have taken place:

• The science supplement of La Vanguardia stopped publishing in the mid-nineties. It lasted just over five years.
• The journal The Sciences, of the New York Academy of Sciences, ceased publication in the spring of 2001, after forty years of existence, having published a total of 242 issues.
• The magazine Mundo Científico disappeared in August 2003, after twenty-two years of existence, having published 247 issues.
• The magazine Investigación y Ciencia disappeared in February 2023, after 46 years of existence, having published 556 issues. A year before, it stopped being published on paper, but it only lasted one year exclusively in digital form.
• The magazine Science News, which has just celebrated its first century of existence, has gone through the following format changes:
• Until 2008 it was published weekly, with 52 issues a year, and 16 pages per issue.
• Between 2008 and 2017, this magazine became biweekly, with 32 pages per issue (not counting the front and back covers), so the annual number of issues was reduced to 26, although the total number of pages remained relatively constant. At the same time, the maximum number of pages of the articles increased, with a corresponding decrease in the number of articles.
• As of 2017, the annual number of issues was reduced to 22, because four double issues with more pages were introduced. Thus, the periodicity became sometimes biweekly and sometimes monthly, and the number of pages was reduced a little, for double copies do not have twice as many pages as single ones.

The attached table shows the evolution of the approximate number of articles published per year in the journal Science News:

Year	Nr. of articles and short notes	Nr. of pages
2007	860	869
2010	620	832
2015	600	836
2018	550	860
2022	430	836

Although the total number of pages has not decreased much, the number of articles published has been reduced by half in just 15 years. Does this mean that there is less and less scientific news, worthy of dissemination, despite scientific publication grows more and more? Or is the magazine selecting a lower number of news, because it prefers to increase the content of each one? I don’t have answers to these questions; one would have to ask the editors of Science News.

And to all this we should add the fact, which I mentioned in other posts, that a growing percentage of scientific news is not true discoveries, but suspicions that something could be this way or that, platitudinous research, gratuitous speculation, unvalidated simulations, or sociological news and disquisitions, the number of genuine scientific news has radically decreased.

Today we have means to calculate and search for information without parallel in the history of humanity: an enormous amount of data, to which we have access through the Internet; encyclopedias more complete than the largest traditional ones; computers a thousand times more powerful than the giants of the sixties, which put at our disposal all the information we want with the simple press of a key... The perspectives are so impressive and revolutionary that we can give free rein to our imagination. And yet, perhaps precisely because of this, less and less science is popularized and the average level of popular publications decreases. Will we squander all these possibilities? Is humanity losing faith in science?

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread about Popular Science: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca