TY - JOUR T1 - Research is like a bad game of ‘telephone’: mitigating the information breakdown from clinicians and researchers to the general public JF - British Journal of Sports Medicine JO - Br J Sports Med SP - 762 LP - 764 DO - 10.1136/bjsports-2019-101364 VL - 54 IS - 13 AU - Zachary Y Kerr AU - Avinash Chandran AU - Scott L Zuckerman AU - Lee Stoner AU - Gary S Solomon Y1 - 2020/07/01 UR - http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/54/13/762.abstract N2 - In the contemporary media environment, it is impossible for researchers to control how their research is disseminated and interpreted. Researchers’ findings can become lost in translation, particularly when deemed ‘newsworthy’. This information breakdown reminds us of the children’s game, ‘telephone’. In telephone, an individual whispers a message to another individual, which is repeated to another and so on. When the final individual receives the message, it has likely changed substantially.Our model of the information breakdown within the research telephone focuses on two factors—the messenger and the receiver (figure 1). The messenger is the researcher who conducts the study, submits the manuscript for review and disseminates the findings through traditional and social media. The receivers of messaging may further propagate the findings, while making their own inferences, thereby crafting slightly revised messages. Unlike the game of telephone, the research telephone does not follow a single path; intermediate pathways can be bypassed (eg, disseminating findings prior to publication). When the scientific method is misrepresented or not comprehensively disclosed, subtle yet important misinterpretations occur, or the research message may be deliberately skewed to maximise ‘clicks’. When scientific writers fail to … ER -