著者

保坂 直紀

出版者

北海道大学科学技術コミュニケーター養成ユニット

雑誌

科学技術コミュニケーション (ISSN:18818390)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.6, pp.3-16, 2009-09

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A content analysis was made of newspaper articles in Japanese general newspapers and in English ones published in the US, on the same scientific research, to verify the difference between them. Three Japanese articles and three in the US were compared to show that Japanese articles are relatively short and are much the same in terms of the contents involved. Articles in the US, in contrast, do not resemble one another and elaborate on far more various stories such as the effort of the scientists involved and the history of the research field. Japanese newspapers have an inclination to focus on the minimum necessary information. These results suggest that, though Japanese newspapers have some advantages in their own ways, there should be some room for consideration to improve their quality to meet the demand of readers who are not necessarily satisfied with Japanese scientific articles as they are.

著者

保坂 直紀

出版者

一般社団法人日本物理学会

雑誌

日本物理學會誌 (ISSN:00290181)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.56, no.3, pp.200-202, 2001-03-05

著者

保坂 直紀

出版者

科学技術社会論学会

雑誌

科学技術社会論研究 (ISSN:13475843)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.7, pp.212-221, 2009-10-20 (Released:2021-08-01)

参考文献数

3

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A brief survey by questionnaire was conducted to show that the readability of newspaper articles on science depends on individual articles. In other words, some kind of articles might generally be considered difficult to read. An open-ended question gave the clue to what gives readers the impression that some stories are difficult and others easy. Some specific words related to the difficulty were extracted from the responses, such as knowledge, interest, specialty, words etc. It leads to the presumption that people tend to think that scientific articles are easy to understand when they contain fewer technical terms and require less previous knowledge of the field they deal with. It was also indicated that readers feel less difficulty in reading a certain article when similar news are often reported by newspapers or TV and have become familiar to them. These results have not been specified in previous studies in Japan, and will be quite helpful in finding the way that the society members share an increasing amount of scientific information these days.