Those who get lost in communication science. Promotion and downplay in university press releases

The present study is part of a larger project based on two matching corpora: one comprising academic articles and the other collecting the respective popularized pieces. Here, we present the preliminary results on a sub-corpus of 39 university e-releases on Covid-19 research. The objective of this study is to investigate how universities use press releases to disseminate research studies while promoting themselves. The analysis puts university press releases and academic articles in correlation by looking at the correspondence between the authors mentioned in the dissemination pieces with the authors and affiliations of the original research. It is argued that in the attempt to promote themselves through press releases, universities might tend to overemphasize the participation of their affiliated authors at the cost of overshadowing external collaborations. The quantitative analysis reveals a tendency for universities releasing popularized pieces to mention more often (and sometimes only) their affiliated authors, even when they are not first authors. External authors’ names and their affiliations are consistently omitted and vague language is used to misrepresent content and authorship.