Differences in Social Science Reporting

Public debate heavily relies on social scientific expertise as demonstrated by recent global events like the coronavirus pandemic. Social scientific knowledge is disseminated and discussed in the mass media, the main arena for the public understanding of social science. However, science communication research overlooks the significance of disciplinary differences in social science reporting while focusing on comparison with the natural sciences. To investigate the reporting of social sciences in the German press as societal communication, anthropology, sociology, and economics are compared within a distant reading approach. In the systematic sample (8,660 articles) over the previous 20 years, the absolute numbers for all disciplines are stagnant, but the share of reporting increases. The section distributions of the three disciplines are quite different but stable over time. In contrast, the sampled periodicals show only subtle differences in reporting. Dramatic events lead to a short-term increase in economics reporting. The combination of the metadata with the semantic structures of the text shows three distinct profiles of social science reporting. These findings reveal the varieties of social science reporting as an important feature in the societal role of the social sciences.