Correction: Public engagement with science-Origins, motives and impact in academic literature and science policy.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254201.].

Trust or attention? Medialization of science revisited.

The article traces the intensifying media orientation of universities and research organizations first by referring to early diagnoses of the spread of mutual observation and attention seeking as defining societies after WWII. This development provides the background for the unlikely, yet massive turn of scientific organizations to the general public, the media and more recently social media. Details are analyzed on the interactional, organizational and systems levels, and are followed with a focus on the reasons motivating universities. A closer look reveals the self-referentiality of institutional communication deriving its rationale from 'imagined publics'. The politically sponsored 'engagement of the public' has been derailed to become marketing, branding and public relations exercises. The unintended consequences of the establishment of communication units and the blurring of science communication and persuasion are conflicts between faculty and management and possibly a loss of trust in science.

Public engagement with science-Origins, motives and impact in academic literature and science policy.

'Public engagement with science' has become a 'buzzword' reflecting a concern about the widening gap between science and society and efforts to bridge this gap. This study is a comprehensive analysis of the development of the 'engagement' rhetoric in the pertinent academic literature on science communication and in science policy documents. By way of a content analysis of articles published in three leading science communication journals and a selection of science policy documents from the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (USA), the European Union (EU), and South Africa (SA), the variety of motives underlying this rhetoric, as well as the impact it has on science policies, are analyzed. The analysis of the science communication journals reveals an increasingly vague and inclusive definition of 'engagement' as well as of the 'public' being addressed, and a diverse range of motives driving the rhetoric. Similar observations can be made about the science policy documents. This study corroborates an earlier diagnosis that rhetoric is running ahead of practice and suggests that communication and engagement with clearly defined stakeholder groups about specific problems and the pertinent scientific knowledge will be a more successful manner of 'engagement'.

Citizen science in South Africa: Rhetoric and reality.

Citizen science, and public engagement with science, has become prominent in science policy programmes. Given the expectations attached to citizen science in academic and science policy discourses, it is worthwhile to look at where the actual work is done. The case of South Africa, the study focus, is interesting because the country follows similar programmes as many developed countries, but has a socioeconomically and educationally more unequal society. Thus, South Africa presented a test example of whether the institutional similarities of science or socioeconomic and educational differences prevail in shaping the reality of citizen science. Results from 56 projects showed that nearly all of them were limited to data collection in life science fields and were managed largely by one university and mainly communicated within the respective science communities. This led us to conclude that the ambitious rhetoric accompanying citizen science in science policy programmes is not matched by reality.

Promises and reservations towards science and technology among South African publics: A culture-sensitive approach.

Against the background that surveys measuring public perceptions of science and technology are often removed from cultural contexts and do not equally represent all regions of the world, this study investigated attitudes towards science and technology among different publics of the South African population. To apply a culture-sensitive approach, theoretical considerations of cultural distance were combined with methodological considerations of segmentation studies, and representative data (n = 3183) were reanalysed. The findings show that six South African publics can be distinguished, and that - despite the fact that all publics see more promises of science than reservations - there tend to be sensitive differences between these publics. In the long run, such findings might help to make science communication more effective.

The social embedding of biomedicine: an analysis of German media debates 1995-2004.

Biomedical research and technologies such as cloning, stem cell research, and the deciphering of the human genome have met with opposition--albeit of different intensity--motivated by ethical values. The debates over the continuation of research and the implementation of the respective technologies are being staged in the mass media. The media have assumed the function of edding" controversial knowledge and technologies into society by using public discourse. The hypothesis is that these discourses follow a common pattern revealing the process of "embedding," and ultimately leading to a change of existing values. In this study, three debates over cloning, stem cell research and the Human Genome Project are analyzed in ten German daily and weekly newspapers over the period 1995-2004. It is shown that the patterns of reporting are more complex than anticipated. Rather than being identical for all technologies, they reveal different courses depending on the kind of knowledge/technology and value sensitivity.