When Science Communication Becomes Parascience: Blurred Boundaries, Diffuse Roles

The communication of science goes hand in hand with technological development and, in general, with the need to apply scientific advancements to the improvement of human wellbeing [...]

The articles in this Special Issue contribute, in various ways and from different angles, to our understanding of how science is communicated and disseminated digitally. The studies include analyses of scientific and parascientific discursive practices across varied domains, such as Business [6], Chemistry [7], Physics and Astronomy, Medicine and Health, Biology and Life Sciences, as well as Earth and Environmental sciences [8]. They concern various topics of current impact and social interest, such as the press and social media coverage of the popular French scientist Didier Raoult [9], the communication of knowledge in the Harvard Business Review [6], COVID vaccines [10] and COVID-19 news [11]. They cover a myriad of scientific and parascientific genres: online readers' comments as user-generated text [10,11], press articles and tweets [9], video genres (Quick Study, Explainer, Tips and Ideas) [6], institutional and personal blogs [8] as well as a strategic proposal (Total SciComm) to broadly and diversely communicate science, from preprints to social and new media [12].
Promoting and easing participation from diverse audiences, including laypeople, can also pose risks and challenges, some of which are touched upon in the articles in this Special Issue. These include disinformation, or difficulty in disentangling speculation from reliable and contrasted information [10]; polemics and conflicts confronting legitimacy and authority [9]; trivialisation; entertainment, which does not necessarily come with ease of interpretation [7]); or the creation and spread of pseudoscientific information [11].
In our call for papers, we launched three sets of questions which are now answered by the results reported within this Special Issue, allowing us a better overall understanding of current scientific and parascientific communication.

To What Extent Does Parascientific Communication Differ from Scientific Communication? Which Features Characterise It/Them?
Parascientific communication takes greater advantage of the medium and platform affordances to foster readers' participation by means of commentaries and reactions, but seems at times to fail in possible opportunities to co-construct knowledge. On the one hand, such affordances seem to be effectively employed by users in media contexts, especially newspapers [10,11] and social media [9], in which readers make their contributions to the creation of knowledge. On the other hand, the corresponding affordances are not so commonly embraced by users in other contexts, such as the Harvard Business Review journal [6]. Moreover, whereas scientific communication through specialised discourse between experts tends to be linear and monosemic, expert-non-expert discourse tends to be non-linear and polysemic and takes advantage of a combination of different modes, which suits different levels of knowledge or expertise.
At a discursive level, parascientific communication seems to be characterised by a greater versatility and a wider range of resources aimed at explaining scientific matters in an accessible manner, as well as at promoting credibility, on the one hand, and dialogicity and closeness with the audience, on the other [6][7][8].

Which New Discoursal Practices Are Emerging in Response to Boundary Erosion in Scientific Communication? What Do They Entail? Who Undertakes These? What Functions do They Fulfil?
In an attempt to democratise science through its dissemination, new practices are emerging. Among the more innovative examples discussed in this Special Issue are videos shared on Facebook [6], graphical abstracts [7] and users' online comments [10,11]. Nevertheless, many other practices can and should be undertaken to communicate scientific ideas and engage all scientists as part of the Total SciCommon strategy proposed by [12], which encompasses scientific film and video, scientific games, scientific art and the scientific novel. These practices are undertaken by experts, journalists and citizens, who can easily respond to scientific topics and controversies. Whereas scientific communication constitutes legitimised, sanctioned knowledge, this needs to be brought closer to the audience and to diverse stakeholders through parascientific communication responses to which can become pseudoscience [11].

Can Well Established Methodological Approaches Be Useful and Valid to Explore Digital Communication, Either in a Scientific or Parascientific Context? What New Perspectives Might Contribute to the Exploration of New Practices?
A well established perspective such as Genre Theory, which approaches textual instances as social action, seems to be useful and valid to explore digital scientific and parascientific communication, although it has to be necessarily combined with other frameworks, among which multimodality seems most pertinent [6,7]. Of particular interest is the analysis of knowledge communication from a multimodal perspective, which encompasses knowledge expansion and knowledge enhancement processes proposed and applied by [6] to the study of the semiotic modes which contribute to making meaning in the interplay between texts and different types of video in the context of the Harvard Business Review. The study of genres has been further combined with other concepts and approaches, such as dialogicity [8], credibility [10] and distance and closeness [11]. New concepts within digital humanities such as textometry [9], which allows us to understand the themes of a corpus through the lexical words used in texts, has also proven highly insightful for the analysis of scientific digital discourse. Most studies have combined quantitative and qualitative analyses to address their object of study, to reveal discursive and social tendencies, but most importantly, to interpret them in the context of global scientific communication in general and, in particular, scientific or parascientific communication through the selected digital practice, genre or platform.
Overall, the contributions included in this Special Issue identify new digital practices of scientific communication, signal unexplored conceptual paths and propose innovative ways of applying existing methods for their study. Taken together, we believe that the seven papers that form this Special Issue will inspire future research and shed light on the diffuse landscape of digital science communication and dissemination.