Shirley Carter-Thomas, Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet. Transmedial recontextualization of new scientific research claims. Discourse, Context & Media, 2025, 67, pp.100930. ⟨10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100930⟩.

This study adopts the “continuity” model of the dissemination of expert knowledge to wider audiences and proposes a nuanced account of how the same new knowledge claim is transmedially repurposed across different genres for different digital audiences. Five series of documents on environmental topics were collected from the Nature platform, with each series comprising the same set of four genres, totalling 20 documents (47,250 words): the original research article (RA); the Nature News & views article, incorporating expert opinion on the initial RA; the Nature podcast, i.e. an interview with the RA author(s); and a popular science magazine article reporting on the RA. We examine how the scientific content, both verbal and visual, is tailored to facilitate comprehensibility for less specialized audiences by analyzing the rhetorical structure of the three recontextualized genres, the strategies used to handle specialized terminology, and the types of visual material contained. The recontextualized genres also set up different relationships with their respective audiences to those in the RAs by using various engagement strategies to interest and involve them. The engagement and interactional features focused on in this study include a contrastive analysis of reader/audience mentions and passives, the use of questions, and the adaptation of titles. By keeping the scientific topic constant across the dataset, we show the fine gradations in how the same knowledge claim is adapted, assessed and circulated among different audiences.