Is Scientific American biased?
AllSides and Ad Fontes Media place Scientific American as leaning left. We have seen it on 1 published story of ours.
Who says so
2 organisations have published a rating for this outlet, in their own words. Where they disagree, the disagreement is the useful part and it is left standing.
How reliably it reports fact
A rating of the newsroom in general, by others, and a different thing from the Trust score we publish on each story, which judges one piece of reporting.
High factuality
Who owns it
We hold no ownership record for Scientific American.
Where it publishes from
- Publishes from
- New York, New York, United States
- Official site
- scientificamerican.com
- Seen publishing on
- scientificamerican.com
- Access
- Free to read
- Wikipedia
- Entry
What we have seen ourselves
Counted across the stories this site has published, which is the only denominator a reader can check: every one of them has a page, and every page lists the reports it was written from.
- Stories
- 1
- Reports listed
- 1
- We could read
- 0
- First seen
- 4 August 2026
1 of those reports was paywalled or blocked to us. Our reading of this outlet is built on the 0 we could open, not on everything it published.
We have not seen Scientific American cover a story that outlets rated left were largely absent from.
On the one story of ours where at least three of the reports we listed carried a time, another outlet was always ahead of Scientific American: its report arrived a median of 12 hours after the earliest one we logged.
Measured 5 August 2026. Last seen in a coverage list 5 August 2026. Ratings pulled 5 August 2026.
Stories we have seen it on
- Scientific AmericanLeans leftHigh factualityChilean mummies reveal a lost lineage of smallpox (opens Scientific American in a new tab)
Our report: Ancient DNA links colonial smallpox in Americas to European strains
Every rating on this page is a named third party’s published work, republished with its author and, where one exists, a link to it. Our own coverage record is the section we measure ourselves. Neither is a judgement of any individual report: those are scored story by story, and the reasoning is on our methodology page.