Author Mentions in Science News Reveal Wide-Spread Ethnic Bias

Media outlets play a key role in spreading scientific knowledge to the general public and raising the profile of researchers among their peers. Yet, given time and space constraints, not all scholars can receive equal media attention, and journalists' choices of whom to mention are poorly understood. In this study, we use a comprehensive dataset of 232,524 news stories from 288 U.S.-based outlets covering 100,208 research papers across all sciences to investigate the rates at which scientists of different ethnicities are mentioned by name. We find strong evidence of ethnic biases in author mentions, even after controlling for a wide range of possible confounds. Specifically, authors with non-British-origin names are significantly less likely to be mentioned or quoted than comparable British-origin named authors, even within the stories of a particular news outlet covering a particular scientific venue on a particular research topic. Instead, minority scholars are more likely to have their names substituted with their role at their institution. This ethnic bias is consistent across all types of media outlets, with even larger disparities in General-Interest outlets that tend to publish longer stories and have dedicated editorial teams for accurately reporting science. Our findings reveal that the perceived ethnicity can substantially shape scientists' media attention, and, by our estimation, this bias has affected thousands of scholars unfairly.