Professors in the media: dynamics of cumulative advantage, reputation, and gender

Abstract Translation of science to a general public is increasingly important in modern academia. Yet, there is little knowledge on whether and why scientists do so. Here, we provide an account of a population of social science professors in Germany (N = 2,207). We ask whether and to what extent scientists appear in German printed media (N = 26,729) as a result of cumulative advantage, reputation, and gender. We link bibliometric data on professors’ careers and data on their appearances in printed media through unique, principled crosswalks of different databases. Departing from the literature on inequality in science, we develop hypotheses on how cumulative advantage, reputation, and gender relate to professors’ media appearances. Employing a series of longitudinal logistic and linear regression analyses we find support for the majority of our conjectures. Cumulative advantages are particularly positively related to newspaper appearances. Once a scientist has been mentioned in the media they seem ‘short-listed’ and this dynamic is more pronounced among men rather than women professors. Reputable professors are also more likely to be in printed news. And men have a higher frequency of newspaper appearances than women, which seems driven by men more likely to be top mediagenic professors. We discuss the implications of these results for media practice and science evaluation.