This article describes the first survey of European science journalists working for general national print media and news agencies in 14 different countries of the European Union. The survey was carried out through the internet and calls for participation were sent to 208 journalists from 102 different media. Answers were received from 97 science journalists, a response rate of 46.6 percent. After the survey, interviews with 12 of the respondents were conducted. The main conclusion is that not only are science journalists becoming more dependent on scientific journals in their daily reporting, they are also spending a lot of time on the internet – 3.5 hours a day, on average – an activity that increases the concentration on breaking news and prevents them from going outside the newsroom to write more feature stories. In consequence, readers are receiving a distorted image of science as a series of ‘discoveries’ or ‘breakthroughs’, distant from the real daily world of scientists and the scientific process. This dependency on the internet, and on ‘ready-to-write’ press releases from scientific journals, is threatening science journalism, as professionals are controlled by the same embargoes, are using the same sources and visiting the same sites, no matter what country they are working in. This loss of information diversity is a consequence of the introduction of the internet in newsrooms, but also a result of the increasing media awareness of science sources.

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In recent years, the use of videos by the scientific community has evolved continuously. Researchers, communicators, and other players are using audio-visual media to reinvent their stories, to deconstruct complex phenomena and to increase the outreach and impact of their scientific publications. An example of this trend is the video abstract: an audio-visual representation of the key findings described in the written abstract. Much of the research in this area is new and focused on content analysis and classification of online science videos. Furthermore, studies with videos and environmental communication are attached to specific topics like climate change. So far, a small fraction of publications has explored the study of the video abstract, its effects, and its potential, as one general scientific area. This paper provides the first characterization of video abstracts in the areas of Ecology and Environmental Sciences. We identified video abstracts in 29 scientific journals, based on impact, representativeness and visibility criteria. A database of 171 videos, from 7 publishers and 17 different video channels was created. Each video was analyzed for different parameters. The analysis considered not only characteristics of each video, but also characteristics from the corresponding scientific papers. Results indicate that between 2010 and 2018 the number of video abstracts increased sevenfold. Despite this growth, there was no solid strategy for disseminating the videos. While most of them are still associated with classic models, such as documentaries, disruptive formats such as animation are the ones that arouse greater interest. Professional shorter videos (2–3 min in length) showed a significantly higher number of daily views and their papers garnered a higher number of citations per day. This data, combined with future qualitative research, will help to develop a model for validating the quality of an Ecology video abstract and provide new insights into the global study of audio-visual communication of science.

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This paper introduces a medium research perspective as a fundamental basis for Social Sciences and Communication fieldwork. Drawing from the affordances of digital networks, it points to the importance of combining knowledge on platform grammatization with data research practices (capture, mining, analysis and visualization). That is what we refer to as call into the platform. Rather than shifting our attention away from the object of study to primarily focus on the technical fieldwork, we assume this latter as something that takes part in the doing of digital social sciences research. For this purpose, we present the case of Portuguese Universities on Facebook, which comprises all public universities in Portugal including one private. The study interrogates how digital networks serve communication and social sciences studies. To respond to this question, we explored two distinctive digital networks that shed light in the institutional connections and the visual culture of higher education in Portugal. The first, Facebook Page Like network, comprises all connections made by a given page; the act of liking other pages or being liked in return. The second is built upon the affordances of computer vision and depicts the connections between images and their descriptive labels: a network of Facebook Pages timeline images. Beyond providing new ways to design and implement research that can be repurposed for different studies, the main contribution of this paper lies in embracing the methods of the medium as key for digital social sciences.