There is no single “science communication skill”

When we talk about communication skills for science and research, we sometimes put this all under the umbrella of “science communication”, and we discuss this as if it were a single skill researchers need to learn. In practice, the situation is usually more complicated.

Researchers communicate in many different contexts. They present their work to colleagues in their own field. They collaborate with researchers from other disciplines. They explain findings to policymakers, journalists, students, or public audiences.

Each of these situations places slightly different demands on how research is explained.

A paper from 2022 on science communication training made this point quite clearly: communication strategies tend to be highly contextual. What works in one setting may not work in another.

Explaining a piece of research to an interdisciplinary research team, for example, often requires a different kind of explanation than speaking to a public audience.

In one case, the challenge might be translating disciplinary assumptions. In another, it might involve connecting the work to everyday experience.

This is one reason communication training can be difficult to design well.

Researchers are not learning a single technique. They are learning how to adapt explanations to different contexts and audiences. And that kind of flexibility usually develops gradually, through experience.