Media impact

WHEN CONSIDERING all media stories where SRC’s work was highlighted but its name not, our media analysis tool picked up 6826 stories in print, online or broadcast. Stories where our name was included amounted to 2953, a slight increase from 2018 (2,660), which was already an exceptional year.

The year started with a bang. The launch of the EATLancet report on healthy food systems generated a massive media impact with at least 4,200 stories published worldwide. In Altmetric’s annual analysis of all research outputs published, the report reached 16th place (Altmetric score: 4,633, based on an index that calculates media, blogs, social media and other impact). Given that approximately 3 million academic papers are published each year, this is a considerable success. SRC executive director Line Gordon presented the fi ndings at the press conference for the launch in London at the Wellcome Trust.

But the media success came at a cost. Centre deputy director Victor Galaz analysed the social media impact of the report and revealed that an orchestrated social media backlash in support of meat grew rapidly around the time of the launch. Galaz’s analysis in The Lancet also indicates the pro-meat campaign may even have had a bigger infl uence on social media than the campaign run by the institutes involved in the study.

Newsweek’s headline, “There’s a small, elite group of companies that basically controls the global environment”, captured the essence of “Transnational corporations and the challenge of biosphere stewardship”, a large analysis of corporate control of the biosphere led by the centre’s leadership including Line Gordon, Beatrice Crona, Henrik

Annual stories generated in media

Österblom, Carl Folke and Victor Galaz and colleagues, in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The year ended with another bang. An article in Nature by centre staff provided a formal mathematical defi nition of a climate emergency. The article, entitled “Climate tipping points – too risky to bet against”, went viral attracting about 740 media articles worldwide and becoming the second biggest climate research story of the year, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief, and the fi fth biggest story of the year across all scientifi c disciplines according to Altmetric database (score 9,052).

And fi nally, Belinda Reyer’s paper in Science, “Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change”, would have topped the list with a media impact of 2,396 according to Altmetric.