Study: Trying to Popularize Science Won’t Hurt You (and Probably Won’t Help You)

I write, and think, a lot about science outreach activities. I define the term broadly, to cover any efforts to communicate about scientific topics to any audience outside of one’s own discipline. One idea that crops up fairly often is that such efforts to “popularize” science could adversely affect one’s career – particularly in academia. And, while the subject has been the subject of some research, I hadn’t run across a large-scale study that evaluated the hypothesis that outreach […]