By Larry Kummer. Posted at the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: A new paper provides valuable information about climate science — evidence of the politicization that helped collapse the public policy debate. The authors conclude that narratives are “used to positive effect” in peer-reviewed papers. It puts science on the slippery slope to becoming propaganda (or, in today’s jargon, “fake news”). Scientists can achieve career success but destroy the public’s esteem for science accumulated over centuries.
“Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science“
By Ann Hillier, Ryan P. Kelly, and Terrie Klinger.
PLOS ONE, 15 December 2016.
Excerpt. Red emphasis added.
“Climate change is among the most compelling issues now confronting science and society, and climate science as a research endeavor has grown accordingly over the past decade. The number of scholarly publications is increasing exponentially, doubling every 5±6 years. The volume of climate science publications now being produced far exceeds the ability of individual investigators to read, remember, and use. Accordingly, it is increasingly important that individual articles be presented in a way that facilitates the uptake of climate science and increases the salience of their individual research contributions.
“…Despite this, professional scientific writing tends to be more expository than narrative, prioritizing objective observations made by detached researchers and relying on the logical proposition “if X, then Y” to define the structure of the argument.
“Narrative writing, on the other hand, is commonly used to good effect in popular science writing. Both simple narratives and apocalyptic climate narratives are known to capture public attention and spur action. Moreover, narratives can influence perceptions of climate risk and policy preferences among the public, and the narrative style has been proposed as a powerful means of research to address problems of knowledge, policy, and action as they relate to climate change.
“Here we explore the influence of narrative in the professional communication of climate science research, acknowledging that the perception of narrative can be subjective and context- dependent.
Relationship between strength of an article’s narrativity index and how often it is cited.
“…Our results reveal that — at least among the set of peer-reviewed climate change literature included in our dataset — articles featuring more narrative writing styles are more often cited. This effect is independent of year of publication, number of authors, or abstract length.
“…The result is surprising, though, in the context of professional scientific communication, in which expository styles dominate the published literature …and citation frequency is often considered to depend largely — even primarily — upon the strength of the science. These conventions and constraints would seem to eliminate any role for narrativity in professional scientific writing, but our results indicate otherwise.
“…we found an unexpectedly strong correlation between narrativity and journal impact factor: more highly cited journals feature more narrative writing styles. …Whatever the reason, the message to authors is clear: up to a point, more narrative writing styles can increase the uptake and ultimate visibility of one’s research.
“…Peer-reviewed scientific discourse is often viewed as a special form of communication, exempt from the qualities of narratives that humans inherently relate to. However, our findings support an alternative interpretation … evaluative commentary can be used to positive effect.”
© 2016 Hillier et al, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,
—————————End excerpt —————————
This is post-normal science
“The contrasting approach to science, still in the very early stages of development, could be called ‘precautionary’, since it is usually concerned with reacting to the unintended harmful effects of progress. Its style is ‘post-normal’; it lies at the contested interfaces of science and policy. It addresses issues where, typically, facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.”
— “The Post-Normal Science of Precaution” by Jerry Ravetz. An update of his “What is Post-Normal Science?” from Futures, September 1999.
This is elegant language describing post-normal science. It has a sound theoretical foundation, but is often used to justify corruption of science for political purposes. Science has always been slanted to justify society’s beliefs; post-normal science does so openly and boldly — with industrial age efficiency. For more about this see Wikipedia.
Abstract for this paper
“Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science.“
“Peer-reviewed publications focusing on climate change are growing exponentially with the consequence that the uptake and influence of individual papers varies greatly. Here, we derive metrics of narrativity from psychology and literary theory, and use these metrics to test the hypothesis that more narrative climate change writing is more likely to be influential, using citation frequency as a proxy for influence.
“From a sample of 732 scientific abstracts drawn from the climate change literature, we find that articles with more narrative abstracts are cited more often. This effect is closely associated with journal identity: higher-impact journals tend to feature more narrative articles, and these articles tend to be cited more often. These results suggest that writing in a more narrative style increases the uptake and influence of articles in climate literature, and perhaps in scientific literature more broadly.”
About the authors
The lead author is Ann Hillier, who has a 2016 degree as a Master of Marine Affairs from the University of Washington. Professor Terrie Klinger is Director of UW’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. Trained as both an ecologist and a lawyer, Ryan Kelly is an Assistant Professor in UW’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs.
For More Information
Hat tip for this paper to Luboš Motl at The Reference Frame.
For more information see The keys to understanding climate change, My posts about climate change, and especially these…
- Thomas Kuhn tells us what we need to know about climate science.
- Daniel Davies’ insights about predictions can unlock the climate change debate.
- Karl Popper explains how to open the deadlocked climate policy debate.
- Paul Krugman talks about economics. Climate scientists can learn from his insights.
- Milton Friedman’s advice about restarting the climate policy debate.
I suggest that any form of communication is a … “narrative”, and that there are many different styles of narration, where a strict science style is one form, and a child’s nursery rhyme is another form.
I think the proper focus, then, is style.
All writing, like all art, involves a style. In art, you might say that we have realism at one extreme and abstract expressionism at another. In writing, we have Lagrangians, say, at one extreme and Bible stories at another.
As such, the style of scientific expression can evolve as an admixture of both traditional and more creative styles.
There once was a point called an “atom”.
He slowly transformed to battalions
of many divisions
at first not envisioned,
but later, when looked for, stayed hidden.
There is still some truth in the old saying that technical/scientific writing is meant to inform, while narrative is meant to entertain.
The Lysenkoization of modern climate science continues apace.What’s to be done?
I didn’t expect the current Lysenkos to just roll over and go away when Trump won, did you? They were already going to bring on a public climate narrative after HRC won, but they doubly need to ramp it up now as a last resort. They obviously need to try one last push (the push that was supposed to ensure cementation of the previous POTUS using executive powers to bypass congress) as they try and regroup to recapture public attention with threats of doom. They are trying everything they can think of to sink the Trump flotilla before it leaves port so they still have some hold on the discipleship that wasn’t well enough distributed to win an election.
I would like to raise issues about peer review processes in climate science. All the IPCC authors are serving the role of the editorial committee. It is their reward to promote scary AGW story. Any theory that threatens their known path can never be led to publication stage. I am aware of several occasions where the editor collected a third reference (for rejecting the paper) when the other two reviewers gave a recommendation of revision. The third reviewer raises unusual comments to reject that paper that reflects their lack of knowledge (as a reviewer) in the subject area. Such practice should be exposed. In some cases, the editor simply rejects a paper even other two reviewers give revision comments. It is the practice nowadays to stop any critical ideas to be published through the IPCC led academic journal publication system. I urge to investigate the review process through an independent committee thoroughly. There are other very crucial issues in the review process as well those need to be exposed. It works as a chain system- promote AGW theory- more publications – more career progression etc. If it is the other way, round you must be stopped by any means at the very beginning.
Post-normal science = post-modern science = propaganda dressed up as science.
A part of the “Progressive idealisms package” that was used by socialists to hijack the Democratic party and public education.
Propaganda was a dig at the Catholic Church
Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith). According to Wikipedia, it started to be used for propagating ideas in secular activities and “the term began taking a pejorative or negative connotation in the mid-19th century, when it was used in the political sphere.”
Now that its tainted with being associated with communism because of its unfetted use to control the population, the left need to rebrand it.
Orwell rebranded it already as “Big brother”, IMHO.
Citing a reference, primarily goes with the author and institution but not on the merit of the research paper. Even excellently researched paper rarely gets its share in citing — many a times they don’t understand the science with their mediocre knowledge on the subject.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Perceptive, as usual, Dr. R. It may be that a narrative style is easier to understand or that it gives a reader a greater illusion that he/she understands. In either case, the likelihood of citing the paper goes up, independently of the quality of the paper’s science.
The r² value of 0.05 certainly leaves me with no illusion that there’s anything of major impact in this paper. The time span of the selected abstracts in the paper may be insufficiently small to remove the effects of mutual time dependency. A year (2009 to 2010) is a long time for this field. Authors in general may be coincidentally using increasing numbers of citations at the same time that narrative style is becoming more popular with peer reviewers, journals, and universities, and thus more popular with the abstracts’ authors.
N,b,: I’ve not studied the subject paper sufficiently to be certain that the authors haven’t already addressed the latter factor. From what I saw, they have done a fairly thorough job.
I would like to share my experience of the peer-review system. Once I reviewed a paper in a high-impact academic journal where one of the co-author was one editor of that journal. I found that paper not of very high quality and gave comments for major revision. It had problems with basic understandings. Surprisingly, when the revised version came to me with the comments from the other reviewer, I was shocked. That review comment was only of 3-4 lines where it only praised that work. It was very clear to me that the review comment was not from any expert and it could also be from a fake reviewer with a fake id. I tried to improve that manuscript with constructive comments, and the paper was finally published after my hard effort. But it exposed how evil measures are followed by scientists to get their paper published. Why there is not an investigation/ database to check how many papers are published by an author in a journal of their editorship? Why not the review comments are checked properly?
From the article: “Both simple narratives and apocalyptic climate narratives are known to capture public attention and spur action.”
The leftist scientists assumed long ago, even if the science is bs, that enacting draconian climate legislation is the “right thing to do,” and thus that they have justification and rationalization to lie in the effort to get their heinous programs through:
So this is the type of Crying Wolf “scary scenarios” they have constantly propounded:
Obviously the ‘science’ is politicized as those turning their papers into narrative propaganda are not interested in the unvarnished truth but instead they are not impartial scientists but advocates for a (leftist) cause, whose sole goal is to promote that cause through whatever shenanigans they can muster.
Politicized science by definition is NOT credible.
What is this? A guide book to good grant application writing? And that graph is hardly convincing for me. What are the abscissa? That straight line looks more like an amorphous blob to me.
I agree RoO- it looks like a shotgun that throws a very bad pattern.
The authors gave us both barrels, for a better r².
Speaking of grants:
Question to Dr. Richard Lindzen: Is it possible for a young person today to get tenure in one of these institutions (universities) if they disagree with global warming alarmism?
Dr. Richard Lindzen: … NOT OPENLY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so3ELA7NpVw%5D
Lindzen continued: “…and in your grant applications you can’t say ‘I want to check whether global warming is real or not’ [laughs].
So there’s an overwhelming per-selection bias for any supposed consensus of climate scientists. This makes that consensus essentially meaningless. It is not a voluntary consensus but a consensus achieved through force.
The bottom line is no one has a clue how to predict climate, what the factors are, and how they interact in any competent way to make something called a prediction. Therefore, narrative storyline expose’s on climate are to be expected as the norm. Discoveries into the causative nature of climate just have not occurred, and therefore it has been replaced with whimsical, fanciful, and conjectural fantasies of cause and effect. The demand for more papers as journal count increases is like predicting a breakthrough in battery technology…usually the hacks and quacks show up to present big “breakthroughs.”
I am reminded by this article of the KISASS methodology:
Keep It Simple And Sufficiently Scary.
” … doubling every 5±6 years” ???
Good Lord – that sounds like the sort of settled science that comes out of the IPCC CMIP models! 🙂
I’m guessing it’s meant to be “5 to 6 years”.
Larry,
“Scientists can achieve career success but destroy the public’s esteem for science accumulated over centuries.”
Science is a method, an intellectual tool in essence, and I doubt the public have lost respect for that . . but rather, for a sort of larger than life pseudo entity . . a supposed conglomeration of special human beings, which is often referred to as if science itself. (In SJW speak; “the scientific community” ; )
I consider it a wise that the public lose esteem for that supposed super-entity thingy . . but that doesn’t mean losing esteem for actual scientific research or reasoning, just for the sort of thing that can lead to politicization and bullying and so on.
Something very wrong with the Narrativity Index chart. If the number of citations is logarithmic as the index indicates, then at least a score of the papers used for the study have had from a hundred thousand to over a million citations EACH!. And three of them have had over ten million citations each! I find that very difficult to believe.
I’ll wager that the vast majority of those climate science publications assume dangerous, human-caused climate change is happening, and then tell you what bad thing will occur as a result, usually to something that couldn’t possibly be related.
I write science fiction, so anything that follows is suspect. But it seems to me that scientific papers were always incomprehensible to the layman, and relied on writers who were also scientists to interpret them to the public via books. George Gamow and Isaac Asimov are good examples. “Narrative index,” however it’s calculated, applies to fiction, or at best, journalism. I propose “Scientifically Important Index” be applied to climate papers, at which moment 99.9% are rated 0. I suppose the competition among scientists to get published is now equal to fiction writers trying to get their first novel on the shelf. But don’t look to me for a book on the future of climate change. It’s dead in the water.
“Climate change is among the most compelling issues now confronting science and society, and climate science as a research endeavor has grown accordingly over the past decade. The number of scholarly publications is increasing exponentially, doubling every 5±6 years.”
Business is good!
Think of what a monster this climate change business has become!
Warmists are leftist bullsh!tters – it IS that simple.
Narrative is popular since you don’t need to look up from your cell phone too long.
More likely the narrative style is easier for most people to understand than page after page of mathematics, thus it gets cited more.
Also, the narrative style allows for a construction such as “X may cause Y”, which seems to be the basis of most research papers these days. You can pretty much prove anything once you add the word “may”.
Yes, ferd, narrative style is not inconsistent with equivocation.
This message was just sent to Pres Elect Donald Trump, I would recommend everyone reading this to do the same.
Create a Scientific Research Watchdog, staffed with forensic scientists, to ensure that there is no fraud in Federal Funded Science Research. The Field of Climate “Science” relies on “Peer Review” which allows a group of self-anointed “experts” that bully, silence, and marginalize skeptics and manipulate data to manufacture a “consensus” and produce “models” that validate their predetermined conclusions. Real/Classical Science is done by application of the scientific method through falsification (rejecting the null), experimentation, data analysis, and reproducibility. Climate “Science” relies on none of those classic scientific approaches, and instead re-wrote the book to replace the scientific method with computer models, consensus, peer review and manufactured data and statistical techniques like “Mike’s Nature Trick…to Hide the Decline.” I work in the finance field and If I were ever to use the techniques I’ve seen in the field of climate “science” I would be behind bars. Same for people in drug research, real estate construction or any field that requires engineering or data integrity for making a conclusion, Climate “science” is simply one giant tax-payer funded fraud, and simple double blind analysis, a requirement for objective reproducibility, transparency in the construction of the temperature reconstructions, mandatory application of the scientific method and a simple review of how poorly the IPCC models actually model the temperature will prove that. The computer models can’t even hindcast, let alone forecast (Google Climate Models Fail Dr Spencer). To solve this problem forensic scientists should be hired to review and expose the fraud that is emblematic of Climate “Science.” To start, I would simply hire Steve McIntyre to lead the charge. He is the ideal candidate to lead an impartial, systematic and honest search for the truth. He has been viciously attacked by the climate alarmists and did a Nobel Prize worthy effort voluntarily exposing the flaws in the “Hockey-Stick.” His, and other persecuted skeptics, efforts should not go unrecognized, for he is the epitome of an unbiased and honest scientist/engineer.
https://apply.ptt.gov/yourstory
Sciencey Narratives like cAGW are effective for initiating research dollars, as politicians control those research dollars they are very appreciative of these narratives especially fear-narratives like cAGW. Politicians like fear-narratives as they are the easiest way to manipulate the populous.
The narrative is CO2-man-made-global-warming-climate-change-extreme-weather-fear-fear-fear
fear of . . .
drought
floods
melting ice
hurricanes
tornadoes
polar bears dying
bleaching coral
species extinction
rising seas
melting glaciers
blah blah blah . . . and the scientists in these fields gladly feed the fear-narrative, in return they get large research grants and the politicians get fear to initiate policy based fact making (PBFM) and new carbon-taxation that can feed the government coffers. The government also has to use the Green-energy pseudo-sciencey/engineering as a prop/sop to get the new taxation they are after.
. . . It’s the perfect sociological storm to manipulate the plebes to pay the way for the sceincey and political elites.
And the populace, too!
Side-note: Wikipedia scrubs its articles for non-AGW content, so why give them eyeballs? Recommend Infogalactic links where possible.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Post-normal_science
Wow!
Another scattergram that looks like someone using a shotgun in a crosswind – and this one uses semi-log coordinates! And the ordinate covers 7 orders of magnitude!!!
A tool for mendacity – an author trying desperately to convince everybody of something that ain’t necessarily so…