Paper short abstract:

This study examines the visibility of sociologists in the German media during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on their visibility in relation to their contributory expertise. A key aim is data collection on both their public statements and academic publications for further research.

Paper long abstract:

The emerging COVID-19 pandemic led to a high demand for academic experts in the German media. In addition to virologists and epidemiologists social scientists and sociologists also contributed to the discussion of the consequences of the pandemic and the corresponding measures. Our exploratory study analyses the public visibility of these sociologists in relation to their academic contributions to the pandemic.

We describe this relationship using the distinction between interactional and contributory expertise. The guiding research question is "To what extent does the public visibility of sociologists correlate with a contributory expertise in the subject area of their statements?".

A first key research objective is to collect data on the public communication of German-speaking sociologists, on the one hand, and on their academic publications on the other. To this end, we examine the coverage of the pandemic in German national newspapers and a public radio station in 2020 and 2021. Sociologists' publications will be collected through keyword searches in journals known for sociological research, conference papers as well as edited volumes on the pandemic published between 2020 and 2023.

Following this data collection we examine the correlation between the public visibility of sociologists and their contributory expertise on the topic at hand. We also investigate the extent to which sociologists with a high research output are visible in the media. In this respect, our study also refers to Weingart's concept of medialization and in particular to the relationship between academic reputation and media visibility.