Heuristics of scientific discourse in research-related press releases: Lexical and phrasal traces

Entrepreneurial universities and research institutions (Clark 1998) sponsor their research activities through the media with the aim of increasing their popularity, bolstering their reputation, and attracting students and resources. Paralleling the hybridization of corporate press releases (PRs) (Catenaccio 2007, 2008; Jacobs 1999, 2009), these institutions have started using PRs as a promotional tool along with the traditional goal of disseminating and popularizing knowledge (Di Ferrante, Lattanzi, and Petrocelli in print; Lattanzi 2020). Sensationalism and the strategy of spotlighting the institution issuing the PR drive the “entextualization” (Garzone 2021: 172) of information towards a less rigorously scientific report, which in turn may engender biased representation of scientific knowledge in the media (Maci 2019: 18, Maat 2007, Summer et al. 2014, Woloshin et al. 2009, Yavchitz et al. 2012). This paper presents the first results of a broader project aimed at creating an annotation system of PRs for future use by media operators. The mark-up is based on heuristics derived from the collection of lexical and phrasal units that are expected to account for the structural and procedural requirements of scientific research design and publication. The instances were collected with an interrater procedure from a corpus of 110 pairs of press releases and their source scientific articles. Lexical and phrasal units were grouped into eight categories further subcategorized with frequencies. The categories are: Publication procedure, Research group, Facilities, Study object, Methodology, (if experimental) Features of experimental subject(s) or object(s), Innovation, Inferences.