Technology news and their linkage to production of knowledge in robotics research

摘要

Robotics is a growing academic field that has received extensive social attention, where both promising and contested opinions can be found with regard to its applications. To understand commonalities and differences between social expectations and academic research, we analyzed the relationship between sentiment polarity appearing in news articles and topical coverage of academic publications. We found that news discourse is shifting from a prevailing positive view towards a more neutral stance in recent years. However, the sentiment and levels of attention vary widely depending on the specific topic being covered. When topics in the news are compared to those in academic articles, news coverage leans towards applied academic research. Also, highly similar topics in both news and academic publishing tend to appear earlier as a social discussion when expressing a positive sentiment. We discuss these findings in the contexts of science communication and transdisciplinary research.