Despite the importance of social science knowledge for various stakeholders, measuring its diffusion into different domains remains a challenge. This study uses a novel text-based approach to measure the idea-level diffusion of social science knowledge from the research domain to the journalism and policy-making domains. By doing so, we expand the detection of knowledge diffusion beyond the measurements of direct references. Our study focuses on media effects theories as key research ideas in the field of communication science. Using 72,703 documents (2000-2019) from three domains (i.e., research, journalism, and policy-making) that mention these ideas, we count the mentions of these ideas in each domain, estimate their domain-specific contexts, and track and compare differences across domains and over time. Overall, we find that diffusion patterns and dynamics vary considerably between ideas, with some ideas diffusing between other domains, while others do not. Based on the embedding regression approach, we compare contextualized meanings across domains and find that the distances between research and policy are typically larger than between research and journalism. We also find that ideas largely shift roles across domains - from being the theories themselves in research to sense-making in news to applied, administrative use in policy. Over time, we observe semantic convergence mainly for ideas that are practically oriented. Our results characterize the cross-domain diffusion patterns and dynamics of social science knowledge at the idea level, and we discuss the implications for measuring knowledge diffusion beyond citations.

翻译：尽管社会科学知识对各利益相关方至关重要，但衡量其向不同领域扩散的方法仍面临挑战。本研究采用一种新颖的文本分析方法，从思想层面衡量社会科学知识从研究领域向新闻与政策制定领域的扩散。通过这一方法，我们将知识扩散的检测范围扩展到直接引用测量之外。本研究聚焦传播学领域的核心研究思想——媒介效果理论。基于提及这些思想的三个领域（即研究、新闻与政策制定）的72,703份文献（2000-2019年），我们统计了各领域对这些思想的提及频次，估计其领域特定语境，并追踪比较跨领域及时序差异。总体而言，我们发现不同思想的扩散模式与动态存在显著差异：部分思想能在领域间扩散，而其他则不能。基于嵌入回归方法，我们比较了跨领域的语境化含义，发现研究与政策领域间的语义距离通常大于研究与新闻领域间的距离。同时，思想在不同领域中的角色发生显著转变——从研究中的理论本身，到新闻中的意义建构工具，再到政策中的行政应用手段。随时间推移，我们观察到语义收敛主要发生在实践导向的思想中。本研究结果刻画了社会科学知识在思想层面的跨领域扩散模式与动态特征，并探讨了超越引用的知识扩散测量方法的启示意义。