Some 4,000 journalists from all over the world attended the Copenhagen climate summit last December, as did roughly 2,000 people from universities and research centers, including 280 professors. But if the measure is the number of academics quoted in news articles, one might conclude that the two groups rarely mixed.

This is one of various questions raised by a new analysis of international print media coverage by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Led by institute researcher James Painter, the report analyzed 427 articles published in twelve countries during the first and last three days of the conference. Targeted for analysis were two newspapers – a broadsheet and a tabloid – in a mixture of industrialized and developing countries.

In short, the analysis suggests that climate science was largely jettisoned as journalists – understandably, perhaps – chased after the political story of the day (Reuters). As indicated in the graph above, nearly 80 percent of the articles dedicated less than 10 percent of their content to science, while fewer than 10 percent spent more than half of their space on science. Academics were quoted on the science just 12 percent of the time, although this does not necessarily mean that scientists as a group were sold short. The study differentiated among academia, advocacy groups, national organizations such as the UK Met Office and international organizations such as the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all of which have their own scientists on hand at such events.

For Painter, this suggests that science went under-reported at the climate talks, and that many science institutions need to think about how they engage with the media. “Greenpeace had 20 people working on the media and the IPCC had just one,” Painter says. “That is quite a disparity.” As for the roughly 250 universities represented in Copenhagen, they registered a total of 12 press officers. “It would help to get the voice of climate scientists more out there if there were more university press officers who could step in quickly to help with the relevant questions,” Painter says.

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Although eighty percent of the journalists were from industrialized countries, nearly 600 journalists came from G77 countries that make up the main negotiating block for the developing world. China and Brazil had more than 100 journalists each at the conference. Interestingly, the newspapers in Brazil and India published the most articles about the talks, although those stats were driven in large part by wire stories posted online. Despite the then-fresh controversy over leaked emails from the University of East Anglia and errors in the IPCC’s fourth assessment, the voice of climate skeptics rarely made it into stories.

“I think it is a really interesting report, but it is limited by only dealing with print media,” Diana Liverman, co-director, Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona in Tucson wrote to me in an email. “I mostly did TV and radio interviews in Copenhagen.”

This isn’t news to the Oxford crew, of course. This kind of media analysis is hard to come by, in part because it is so difficult to do. Covering even a small sample of print publications is hard enough; tracking television and radio news in any definitive way would be orders of magnitude more difficult. Regardless, Liverman says she agrees with the fundamental message that scientists “need to take media engagement more seriously.”