{"id":1781,"date":"2026-08-04T22:57:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T22:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/research-project\/unreliable-science-unravelling-the-impact-of-mainstream-media-misrepresentation\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T06:52:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T06:52:16","slug":"unreliable-science-unravelling-the-impact-of-mainstream-media-misrepresentation","status":"publish","type":"academic_project","link":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/research-project\/unreliable-science-unravelling-the-impact-of-mainstream-media-misrepresentation\/","title":{"rendered":"Unreliable science: Unraveling the impact of mainstream media misrepresentation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Project period:<\/strong> 1 October 2024-31 March 2026.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Funder:<\/strong> European Media and Information Fund (EMIF).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Grantee:<\/strong> University of Turku. <strong>Partners:<\/strong> University of Sheffield and OIKOPLUS GmbH.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Team leader:<\/strong> Senior Research Fellow Kim Holmberg. <strong>Hamed Ahmadinia\u2019s role:<\/strong> Senior Researcher.<\/p>\n<p>The project examines representations of retracted, corrected, low-quality and unrefereed research in mainstream and professional media, the subsequent circulation of misleading stories on social media, public awareness, and possible legal or regulatory responses.<\/p>\n<p><!-- had-v503-unreliable-mooc --><\/p>\n<section>\n<h2>[Un]reliable Science MOOC contribution<\/h2>\n<p>Hamed Ahmadinia contributed two recorded lectures to the [Un]reliable Science MOOC hosted on DigiCampus as part of this project.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=RhZHqhyXDck\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Short lecture: The Retraction of Scientific Publications<\/a> \u2014 1 July 2026.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=axrAaxlsnGs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">[Un]reliable Science: Two Cases Studies on the Spreading of Retracted Articles<\/a> \u2014 11 March 2026.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/digicampus.fi\/course\/info.php?id=6842&amp;lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Open the [Un]reliable Science MOOC information page<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>EMIF-funded University of Turku project examining how unreliable scientific information is represented in mainstream media and how misrepresentation can shape public understanding. My contribution also includes two recorded lectures for the [Un]reliable Science MOOC on DigiCampus, addressing scientific retraction processes and the continued circulation of retracted health research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"had_status":"COMPLETED","had_start":"","had_end":"","had_period":"1 October 2024-31 March 2026","had_external_url":"https:\/\/gulbenkian.pt\/emifund\/news\/2024-call-for-proposals-results\/","had_project_participants":"Public-media corpus; no directly recruited human participants. The final analytical corpus contains 384 accessible online news posts from 115 news outlets referring to 46 retracted mental-health research articles. The analysis examines titles and full text, retraction awareness, citation purpose and position, author polarity, outlet characteristics, authorship and professional background, audience-engagement features, publication\/retraction timing, and Altmetric-linked metadata. The study uses a mixed descriptive scientometric and interpretive content-analysis design.","had_sample_label":"384 news posts","had_methods":"Descriptive scientometrics; Interpretive content analysis; Stratified random sampling; Retraction-awareness coding; Citation & framing analysis; Pre\/post-retraction comparison","had_data_sources":"384 news posts; 115 news outlets; 46 retracted mental-health articles","had_countries":"","had_output_note":"Educational and dissemination outputs include the [Un]reliable Science MOOC contribution on DigiCampus and two recorded YouTube lectures. These are project outputs, not elements of the empirical source corpus.","had_progress":100,"had_dashboard_kicker":"","had_sample_metric_label":"ANALYTICAL CORPUS","had_country_metric_label":"","had_source_metric_label":"SOURCE NODES","had_output_metric_label":"","had_method_heading":"Methods used","had_method_kicker":"METHODS","had_source_heading":"Corpus and source ecology","had_source_kicker":"EVIDENCE","had_outputs_heading":"","had_outputs_kicker":"LINKED OUTPUTS","had_country_count_override":"","had_source_count_override":"3","had_output_count_override":"","had_news_effect":"global","footnotes":"","_had_popup_image_id":0,"_had_popup_image_fit":"automatic"},"tags":[308,310,309,307],"class_list":["post-1781","academic_project","type-academic_project","status-publish","hentry","tag-mainstream-media","tag-media-misrepresentation","tag-science-communication","tag-unreliable-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/academic_project\/1781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/academic_project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/academic_project"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1781"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/academic_project\/1781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3206,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/academic_project\/1781\/revisions\/3206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahmadinia.fi\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}