SciCommBites Wrapped: A 2025 Digest of Science and Society Research
TL;DR: This digest highlights key patterns and emerging themes at SciCommBites from the 40 posts we published in 2025, compared with previous cohorts. Our most-covered themes were stories, communication channels, public engagement with science, and trust in science. Content on storytelling and narratives grew by 300%. Bites became more domain-specialized, focusing less on sciences in general and more on specific disciplines. Environmental outreach grew the most, while scicomm in medicine in health sciences – second most-frequent category – declined post-covid.
2025 in Review
40 New Posts!
In 2025, our cohort of authors published 40 posts, from meta research on science and society to best outreach practices in specific disciplines. Reading all of them (and why wouldn’t you?) would take about 3 hours… An excellent way to reflect on 2025, we think!
We Covered 12 SciComm Domains Across 11 Science Fields
Our authors write about the topics that excite and inspire them. That’s how our work covers all domains of science communication (Fig. 1, top subplot):
- outreach towards children;
- citizen science;
- communication strategies;
- controversial and uncertain science and risk communication;
- emotions and humor in scicomm;
- science language and writing;
- practice of science and scicomm;
- public engagement in science;
- communication channels;
- storytelling and narratives;
- trust and perception of science; and
- visible scientists.
Content from top-four most frequent categories in 2025 (Fig. 1, top subplot) – scicomm channels and storytelling and narratives (12 posts each), public engagement (10), and trust and perception of science (8) – accounted for more than half of all assigned categories, which shows that our writers have a strong interest in topics related to how science interfaces with the public and how to reach audiences better.
Science communication is not only about the depth but also about the breadth: we don’t focus on understanding just one science topic but reach across science disciplines (Fig. 1, bottom subplot). Our content touched on everything from natural to social sciences, from artificial intelligence to law and policy, from space to urban studies. In 2025, we had 40% less bites on sciences in general (9 bites), as more authors chose to write more about outreach in specific disciplines (Fig. 2, right subplot).
We even reached new frontiers with our very first bites about space and math! If you missed them, read why space journalism needs a bit more critique and how to make math relatable by bringing students on guided explorations.
Trending Categories of 2025
The Environment is Hot, Medical Research Cools Down
Our 2025 team is passionate about climate and the environment: 6 of our 8 authors wrote about climate at least once! With 13 posts, it was our hottest science category of 2025, growing by 63% from 2023 (Fig. 2, right subplot). Take a bite of our climate obsession by exploring why the fear of public opinion prevents farmers from discussing climate change.
We launched a new format – climate memos – which focus on how to reach audiences better when talking about climate. Here is a refresher on how to make climate messages relatable for a wider audience by leveraging universal morals.
Post-pandemic interest in medical and health science outreach declined slightly (Fig. 2, right subplot). But it is still going strong as our second most frequent discipline with 8 bites. See how including young people helped move forward mental health dialogue during COVID.
As climate change continues to become a global conversation, research that helps us figure out how to communicate the implications is extremely important.”
Alex Music, Social Media Manager and a 2025 cohort Writer & Editor at SciCommBites
Stories Work
Ask any experienced science communicator and they’ll tell you that stories matter. Our authors agree. This year, the number of bites on storytelling and narratives grew 4x, more than any other category (Fig. 2, left subplot). Read how graphs help make a more positive story.
Storytelling taps into something profoundly human in all of us. By continuing to leverage the more human aspects of science, communicators can effectively change not only perceptions of science, but of scientists as well.”
Héctor L. Torres Vera, Managing Editor at SciCommBites
So, Do We Still Trust Science?
Trust in science maintained a steady interest amongst our authors over the years (Fig. 2, left subplot). Many of our authors are active or former scientists, so this is not at all surprising: knowing whether your audience trusts in science is an important factor to consider when planning your outreach. Take a look at how disclosing personal details shapes public trust and review the global state of trust in scientists and their role in society.
Something Old, Something New
Beyonds are Back!
We worked hard to summarize the latest state-of-the-art research on science communication for you. But we also revived one of our favorite content categories, Beyond the Research posts. These opinion-driven pieces go beyond a single paper. This year’s Beyond explored why the Apollo 11 Moonwalk coverage by The New York Times is relevant for preparing how to communicate the return of humans to the Moon.
*cue the outro*
After a year off to rebuild and reorganize SciCommBites, we came back swinging in 2025. We here on the SciCommBites Admin Team want to send a massive thank you to our 2025 cohort and Senior Editors for all the hard work they put in this past year – we couldn’t have done it without you! We’d also like to thank our wonderful readership for supporting us over the years. Forges at SciCommBites are burning hot as we are currently preparing for onboarding our 2026 author cohort. We can’t wait to see what perspectives on science and society the next writers and editors will bring!
See you soon!
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The purpose of this publication is to offer a high-level overview of the content we published in 2025. The analysis above has several limitations. First, it is based on small-number statistics across only three years (2022, 2023, and 2025); SciCommBites did not publish in 2024, creating a gap in the data. All observed “trends” should therefore be interpreted as descriptive patterns and not robust statistical inferences. Second, all category labels are manually assigned by a single reviewer, introducing inherent subjectivity. Because labels are based on the text of each post rather than original research papers, they carry an additional certain degree of authors’ selection bias. Third, “primary” and “secondary” labels do not always represent consistent weighting: sometimes both topics are covered equally, while in other cases one is the main focus and the other is discussed only briefly or in part.
Written by Mykyta ‘Nik’ Kliapets
Edited by Kay McCallum
Featured image credit: Mykyta ‘Nik’ Kliapets, made in Canva