Why Public Engagement With Science Matters for Research Funding

Science is getting better at helping researchers discover research. But public engagement matters too, particularly when research funding and public support are under pressure.

I keep seeing science publishers launching new AI tools that can search across thousands of papers, pull together findings, summarise research and answer questions across whole collections of academic literature.

And I think a lot of them are very good.

To take one example, Elsevier’s Scopus with AI can generate research summaries, identify influential papers and experts, highlight emerging themes and allow researchers to keep asking questions about a subject. That’s genuinely useful technology.

I can see why researchers want these tools, and I can see why publishers are investing in them.

But I keep coming back to a slightly uncomfortable question.

Are we spending an enormous amount of time, money and technical expertise making science easier to navigate for people who are already inside science, while doing nowhere near enough to help everyone else understand it?

Because those are two very different problems.

Science is getting very good at communicating within science

The amount of research being published makes better discovery tools necessary.

Researchers need ways of finding relevant papers without manually digging through hundreds of search results. They need help understanding what has already been done, where different studies agree, where they contradict each other and where the gaps are.

AI is very well suited to some of that.

So this isn’t an argument against AI research tools. Quite the opposite. Some of them are excellent.

My concern is where so much of the innovation in research communication seems to be directed.

Researcher to publisher to researcher.

University to journal to university.

Expert to research tool to expert.

We are making that circle more efficient.

But what about the much bigger circle outside it?

Does the public actually have a problem with science?

It is tempting to say that public trust in science has collapsed. The reality is more interesting than that, at least in the UK.

The UK Government’s 2025/26 Public Engagement Survey found that 75% of adults trusted scientists working at universities at least a fair amount to provide accurate information about science and technology.

That’s encouraging.

But only 28% said they felt connected with science and actively sought out science news, events, activities or entertainment. Another 49% were interested but did not make a special effort to keep informed, while 23% said that science was simply “not for me”.

That feels like an enormous missed opportunity.

The problem isn’t necessarily that most people actively distrust scientists.

The problem is that millions of people are disconnected from what scientists actually do.

They may trust science in principle while knowing very little about the research happening around them, how it affects their lives, what it costs or why it deserves continued investment.

Trust without connection only gets you so far.

The public is paying for a lot of this research

This part is sometimes strangely absent from conversations about public engagement.

A huge amount of research is supported by public money.

In the UK alone, government R&D investment was £20.4 billion in 2025/26, including £8.8 billion allocated through UK Research and Innovation.

That’s an extraordinary public investment in discovery, innovation, medicine, technology and our future.

Yet ask a random taxpayer what research their money helped fund last year.

Ask them what UKRI is.

Ask them what their local university is researching.

Or, for bonus points, try explaining how scholarly publishing works.

It doesn’t take long before you realise just how invisible much of the research world is to people outside it.

Come off academic LinkedIn for a day and the difference is quite stark.

Inside our bubble there are endless conversations about research impact, open access, publishing, citations, journal metrics, grant funding, research integrity, AI discovery tools and dissemination.

Outside it, most people are getting on with their lives.

That isn’t a criticism of the public.

Why would they spend their evenings looking for research they don’t know exists?

It is our job to reach them.

Why does public engagement matter for research funding?

Because research funding ultimately exists within politics, economics and public opinion.

And right now there are plenty of reasons for researchers to pay attention.

Universities UK reported in May 2026 that 31% of the institutions responding to its survey had already made cuts to academic research activity because of financial pressures.

The pressure is certainly not confined to Britain. In the United States, Nature reported in August 2026 that the National Science Foundation was on course to award around 30% fewer new research grants than the previous fiscal year, producing its lowest number of new grants in more than four decades.

Science cannot assume that funding will always be there because scientists understand how important the work is.

The people making political decisions know that there are competing demands for public money.

The public votes.

Public opinion matters.

If people understand what research is achieving, how it affects their families, what discoveries have already come from public investment and what could be lost when funding disappears, they have a reason to care.

They might even get angry when important science is cut.

But we cannot reasonably expect the public to fight for research they have never been helped to understand.

Public engagement is not a slightly nicer abstract

This is where I think science sometimes lets itself off rather lightly.

Almost everybody working around research will say that public engagement is important.

I rarely hear anybody argue against it.

But look at what sometimes gets called public engagement.

A technical abstract gets rewritten with three fewer acronyms.

A “plain language summary” becomes 18 pages of technical information, except the layout is softer and somebody has added a few photographs.

It is uploaded to a university website.

The impact box gets ticked.

Technically, the research is now available to the public.

But being available to the public and communicating with the public are not the same thing.

If nobody finds it, watches it, reads it, understands it or cares about it, very little communication has taken place.

Science has to go where people already are

The latest UK public engagement data is useful here too.

When people were asked how they preferred to hear about developments in science and health, TV or radio news came first at 59%. Newspapers and magazine articles were selected by 36%, social media by 36% and documentaries by 33%. Younger people were particularly likely to prefer social media.

That shouldn’t be particularly surprising.

People consume information through video, social media, television, streaming platforms, podcasts, news, schools, community organisations and the people they already trust.

Science communication has to compete in that environment.

That might mean animation. It might mean short-form video, documentaries, podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, patient organisations, schools, exhibitions, mainstream journalism or researchers working directly with communities.

There isn’t one format that solves public engagement.

The important thing is that research leaves the research world.

At SciTube, we obviously believe animation and video can play an important part in that. Complex research can often be understood far more easily when people can see a process, follow a story and understand why the work matters before being asked to understand every technical detail.

But this is bigger than video.

The real change is recognising that dissemination should not end when other researchers can find the paper.

Are publishers focusing too much on researchers?

There is an obvious answer to why so many new tools are being built for academic audiences.

That’s where the customers are.

Researchers, universities, libraries and institutions buy scholarly products. There is a clear market for technology that helps them search literature, work faster and extract more value from journal collections.

I don’t blame publishers for responding to that.

But I do worry about what happens if the whole system keeps following the same incentive.

We get increasingly sophisticated at communicating science within science while the distance between science and everybody else grows.

And eventually that becomes everybody’s problem.

Publishers aren’t losing their customers. Not yet, anyway.

But science risks losing one of its most important customers: the public.

Better public science communication benefits everybody

More public understanding of research is not charity.

Publishers benefit when science is valued.

Universities benefit when research is valued.

Scholarly societies benefit when their fields are valued.

Researchers benefit when their work is understood.

Funders benefit when the impact of their investment is visible.

Governments benefit when research produces improvements people can actually see and understand.

And the public benefits from knowing what is being done with its money and why it matters.

The encouraging part is that the audience appears to be there.

The UK survey found that 77% of adults have at least some interest in science. The challenge is that most are not actively going looking for it.

Perhaps science should stop waiting for them to come and find us.

I really like many of the new AI tools being built for research.

I just wish we were seeing the same level of excitement, money and experimentation going into helping the public understand research too.

Because if science wants the public to fight for research funding, it probably needs to give them something worth fighting for first.

Frequently asked questions

Why is public engagement important in science?

Public engagement helps people understand what research is being carried out, why it matters and how it affects society. It can make publicly funded research more visible, strengthen relationships between researchers and communities, and help people make informed decisions about science, health and technology.

How can scientists communicate research to the public?

There is no single best format. Effective public science communication can include video, animation, podcasts, social media, documentaries, journalism, schools, exhibitions, patient organisations and direct community engagement. The format should depend on the audience and the research rather than expecting the public to consume academic papers or technical summaries.

Can public engagement help research funding?

Public engagement cannot guarantee funding, but public understanding and public support matter in a system where governments make decisions about investment in research. If people understand what research achieves and what could be lost when funding is cut, they are in a much better position to value and support continued investment in science.