In the case that the Internet has created an extremely rich supply of science popularization content, how many of the new popular science articles can attract the public to read seriously and thus increase scientific knowledge and enhance scientific spirit?

It's not hard to judge. Although there is no obligation imposed on scientists or research teams to popularize science, there is almost always a column on the home pages or official public accounts of major scientific research institutions and universities.

But how many articles get hundreds of hits or more? On the other hand, how many of the hot articles in the mainstream science popularization accounts are from the reports of such scientific research institutions on the latest scientific research achievements of Chinese scientists?

A popular science editor told me that they attach great importance to timely reporting the important achievements of Chinese scientists, but as a result, reports about these scientific achievements often become "traffic killers."

For this reason, the board can't hit the scientist. What they are most concerned about is the popular science reporting of their scientific achievements, and there should be no mistakes. How can we not make mistakes?

Bringing the abstract of the research paper is undoubtedly the safest and least troublesome way. Can the board hit a research institute publicist? The latter must feel aggrieved.

The results of the author's research in many scientific research institutions show that the Chinese Academy of Sciences system that does the best job in this area is rarely equipped with more than two full-time propaganda personnel.

Each university has a university-level news center affiliated with the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee, usually several people or even a dozen guns are always there, but those who have been trained in popular science writing are often zero.

In this case, the results can be imagined when the demand for reporting scientific research results based on evaluation requirements increases tenfold or even tens of times.

So why can't more science professionals be hired to support the science work of university research institutes? The answer is where the money comes from. Nowadays, in the case of fierce competition in university scientific research institutions,

leaders are willing to "use good steel to the edge of the knife", and are more willing to use more resources to hire or dig more productive front-line scientific researchers. Scientists often complain that administrative staff are ineffective, but at least as far as the communication function is concerned, I have rarely seen an organization's news center overstaffed.

So what about Europe and the US? Don't they need to concentrate their resources on big things? Why, as I wrote in Opinion: What Scientists Do We Need for science? As mentioned in the article, can the average leading research university in the United States have a dozen full-time and part-time science reporters?

At least from the various American universities I am familiar with, we see that the percentage of research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is often as high as 30%. On the other hand,

the dissemination of scientific research results is extremely beneficial for universities to attract social resources, especially alumni donations, which is also the reason why universities are willing to invest in this aspect.

In contrast, for many Chinese scientific research institutions, perhaps the more important consideration in the release of results is that school leaders or even higher-level leaders can see that "our school... Top out Important research ".

The driving path of non-compulsory science popularization

The above gossip is by no means to belittle the significance of popularizing scientific research results. In fact, a systematic study by the China Association for Science and Technology that I led last year shows, but does not prove,

that the timely dissemination of original research results is critical to the eventual realization of scientific and technological innovation on the industrial side. There are also many studies that take the region as the analysis unit, which show that the science popularization index of China's provincial region often has a great correlation with its innovation index.

At the same time, we also see that many well-known scientists, despite their busy work, still invest a lot of energy in science popularization or communication work, such as Zhang Shuangnan, a teacher of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,

and Chen Tongbin, a researcher of the Institute of Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Many academicians are also enthusiastic about science popularization. Their scientific research fields are different,

and the way of popularization of science is also very different. But one thing they have in common is that they don't think science popularization is a waste of their research time.

In other words, in the absence of mandatory popular science requirements, there are still many scientists involved in the field and contributed a large number of wonderful popular science articles or views to the public.