Thinking about Science Communication

There's a lot to think about when it comes to science communication... especially during this time when there's a pandemic but also an infodemic, where too much information becomes too much that it's not useful. With science communication, I think it's the same way... what are aspects that people in the general public need to know, what are aspects that the scientific needs to know, what do experts and people in my field need to know? I think these are often the questions that come up in scientists' minds when they are writing their papers. That's what I was wondering when I did my journal club presentation. My presentation was on lncRNAs expressed following vaccination and their presence particularly in immunological pathways— it was an interesting piece for the current times to read and definitely makes me question a lot about what we know about vaccines currently. It also made me wonder a lot about whether or not we are truly communicating what we know as scientists... I think video abstracts are now a thing to better communicate graphically the overall scope of a project and I think that and more diagrams diagramming the overall scope and workflow of the experiment should be employed. I wonder how much our scientific communication and the way we communicate effectively and efficiently in science will change now... a lot of papers are now open source and labs and scientists have broken down the barriers of pedagogy and authorship and who did what to think about how we can solve this as a global scientific community instead (across cultural and language barriers). In any case, I hope there's some change for the better in that sense! Here are some of my favorite graphics from the pandemic that I've seen around that actually communicate a lot about the science.

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