Why Non-STEM Researchers Need Science Communication Too

When the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation as the top global risks for 2024, the researchers best positioned to respond were not virologists or physicists. They were political scientists, communication scholars, legal experts, behavioral economists, and sociologists — the very academics who most often say the phrase “science communication doesn’t really apply to my field.” That assumption is wrong, consequential, and worth dismantling directly.

The word “science” in science communication is a translation problem. In Indonesian academic culture, it carries strong STEM associations — laboratories, experiments, data sets, quantitative findings. But internationally, and increasingly in Indonesian policy circles, the term refers to any systematic, evidence-based research that generates knowledge intended to improve how society functions. A study on judicial corruption, a behavioral analysis of consumer debt patterns, a policy assessment of digital taxation reform — these are, by the governing definition of science communication, every bit as communicable as a study on vaccine efficacy. The difference is not the subject matter. It is whether the researcher decides to engage.

A 2025 study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications examined public engagement across disciplines and found a persistent gap: scholars in humanities, law, and business were significantly less likely than STEM researchers to produce public-facing content, despite holding findings of equally high societal relevance. The irony identified by the researchers is that HSS findings — on governance, inequality, culture, labor, and policy — are often more directly applicable to readers’ daily lives than laboratory science, yet they are consistently underrepresented in science communication output. The paper concluded that the gap is not one of capability or relevance but of institutional norms that have failed to evolve.

The BINUS cornerstone page’s own track record already makes this argument. The site’s documented SciCom outputs include a BINUS researcher’s analysis of greenwashing practices published in Tempo, a defense policy piece in The Diplomat, an examination of Islamic cinema in 360Info, and commentary on Indo-Pacific security architecture in War on the Rocks. None of these require a pipette or a spectroscope. They required expertise, a clear argument, and the decision to write for an audience beyond the journal. Business lecturers, law faculty, communication scholars, and economists at BINUS possess all three. The only variable is the third.

Where this matters practically for BINUS lecturers outside STEM is in the #binusresearchpoint reporting pathway. The BINUS SciCom framework does not distinguish between disciplines when counting qualified outputs toward KPI. A post from a business researcher analyzing Indonesia’s SME credit gap and a post from a biomedical researcher reporting a new diagnostic marker count identically in the system. The Downstreaming team’s AI-assisted content creation workflow is discipline-agnostic: it works on a qualitative legal analysis as readily as it works on a quantitative materials science finding. The content creation barrier is no higher for non-STEM researchers than for STEM ones.

The action step for humanities, law, communication, and business lecturers at BINUS is simply to stop assuming the SciCom infrastructure was built for someone else. It was built for any BINUSIAN whose research produces findings that people outside the university would benefit from knowing. That is most of you. RTT’s Downstreaming team works across faculties, and the quarterly content creation sessions are open to all disciplinary backgrounds. If your research has a finding that affects how people work, live, vote, eat, borrow money, or understand their rights, it belongs in public communication.

For the full suite of SciCom tools, templates, and reporting pathways available to BINUS researchers across all disciplines, visit the Science Communication page at binus.ac.id/techtransfer/science-communication.

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