Toward a Science of public opinion

Opinion: Conducting science in the public eye

Doing science is usually hidden behinds the wall of the lab and universities, and thus immune from immediate public scrutiny. The current COVID-19 pandemic has dragged the scientific process and its fruits in the public eye. In this short piece, I attempt to discuss the effect of conducting science in the public eye on the public’s perception of science and scientists.

Public Opinion Toward CSSTA: A Text Mining Approach

Recently, the public of Taiwan has had a heated debate on the issue of Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA). After months of simmering tensions between ruling party and opposition party strongly backed by the student-led Sunflower Movement, the debate has finally reached a breaking point on March 18, 2014, at which students occupied the Legislative Yuan. During this period, novel commun...

Public Opinion Toward Legal Sanctions for Crimes of Violence

Deliberative Polls: toward Improved Measures of "informed" Public Opinion?

New research techniques have recently been developed to gather measures of public opinion that is better informed or more deliberative than that recorded in typical mass opinion surveys. These techniques include deliberative polls, educational surveys, and citizen planning cells. In view of what they set out to accomplish, what can we say from a scientific perspective about the utility of these...

Progress toward Public Access to Science

Editorial T he National Institutes of Health (NIH) is about to cross an important threshold. Starting April 7th, the authors of research reports that describe work supported by the NIH will be required to deposit accepted manuscripts into PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH's public digital library of full-text articles, with the understanding that the articles will be freely available for all to vie...