This article reports on a Research through Design study exploring how to design a tool for helping readers of science journalism understand the strength and uncertainty of scientific evidence in news stories about health science, using both textual and visual information. A central aim has been to teach readers about criteria for assessing scientific evidence, in particular in order to help readers differentiate between science and pseudoscience. Working in a research-in-the-wild collaboration with a website for popular science, the study presents the design and evaluation of the Scientific Evidence Indicator, which uses metadata about scientific publications to present an assessment of evidence strength to the readers. Evaluations of the design demonstrate some success in helping readers recognize whether studies have undergone scientific peer review or not, but point to challenges in facilitating a more in-depth understanding. Insights from the study point to a potential for developing similar tools aimed at journalists rather than directly at audiences.
翻译:本文报道了一个研究设计研究,探讨如何设计一个工具来帮助科学新闻读者理解健康科学类新闻故事中科学证据的强度和不确定性,使用文本和视觉信息。一个中心目标是教导读者评估科学证据的标准,特别是帮助读者区分科学和伪科学。通过一个与一个流行科学网站的野外研究合作,研究展示了科学证据指示器的设计和评估,该指示器使用科学出版物的元数据向读者呈现证据强度的评估。设计的评估证明,在帮助读者识别研究是否经过科学同行评审时取得了一定的成功,但指出了促进更深入理解的一些挑战。研究的洞察力指向了开发针对新闻从业者而不是直接面向受众的类似工具的潜力。