Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper's social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities...

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Veröffentlicht in:	PLoS biology Jg. 18; H. 9; S. e3000860
Hauptverfasser:	Carlson, Jedidiah, Harris, Kelley
Format:	Journal Article
Sprache:	Englisch
Veröffentlicht:	United States Public Library of Science 22.09.2020 Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Schlagworte:	Academies and Institutes - organization & administration Academies and Institutes - standards Academies and Institutes - statistics & numerical data Access to Information Audiences Bibliometrics Biographies Biology and Life Sciences Communication in science Computer & video games Computer and Information Sciences Data mining Databases as Topic - organization & administration Databases as Topic - standards Databases as Topic - statistics & numerical data Demography Digital media Electronic Data Processing - organization & administration Electronic Data Processing - standards Electronic Data Processing - statistics & numerical data Genomes Humans Information Literacy Informetrics Internet - organization & administration Internet - standards Internet - statistics & numerical data Medical research Mental health Meta Metadata Methods News media People and Places Political Activism Publications - classification Publications - standards Publications - statistics & numerical data Publications - supply & distribution Religious groups Research and Analysis Methods Science - organization & administration Science - standards Science - statistics & numerical data Science Policy Scientific papers Scientists Segmentation Social Change Social Media - organization & administration Social Media - standards Social Media - statistics & numerical data Social networks Social Sciences United States United States > US
ISSN:	1545-7885, 1544-9173, 1545-7885
Online-Zugang:	Volltext
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Zusammenfassung:	Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper's social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user's followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from nonspecialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints appear to intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist in which extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing the public discourse surrounding scientific research.
Bibliographie:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 14 content type line 23 The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
ISSN:	1545-7885 1544-9173 1545-7885
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pbio.3000860