Exploring public-oriented research communication

Garnering public engagement with academic research in a timely and accessible manner has become a central concern in contemporary academia. This centrality has given rise to a growing interest in the social, communicative, and registral features of public-oriented academic texts, such as academic blog posts. This paper adds to this growing canon with a focus on academic news blog posts from The Conversation — part of a wider register of public-oriented research communication. Through experimental multidimensional and cluster analyses, focusing on one register, represented by texts on one topic (i.e., the climate crisis) from two disciplinary backgrounds (i.e., science and politics), this study offers a nuanced insight into internal variation within public-oriented research communication. Specifically, the paper proposes four text types for the academic news blog posts studied. These include (1) rhetorical narratives; (2) reasoned abstractions; (3) empirical storytelling; and (4) quantitative reflections.