Who tweets climate change papers? investigating publics of research through users’ descriptions

RESEARCH ARTICLE Who tweets climate change papers? investigating publics of research through users’ descriptions Re´ mi ToupinID1*, Florence MillerandID2, Vincent Larivière3,4 1 Laboratory for Communication and the Digital (LabCMO), Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Universite´ du Que´ bec à Montre´ al, Montre´ al, Que´ bec, Canada, 2 Laboratory for Communication and the Digital (LabCMO), De´ partement de Communication Sociale et Publique (DCSP), Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Universite´ du Que´ bec à Montre´al, Montre´ al, Que´ bec, Canada, 3 E´ cole de Bibliothe´ conomie et des Sciences de l’Information (EBSI), Universite´ de Montre´al, Montre´ al, Quebec, Canada, 4 Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies (OST), Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Universite´ du Que´ bec à Montre´al, Montre´ al, Que´ bec, Canada * toupin.remi@courrier.uqam.ca Abstract As social issues like climate change become increasingly salient, digital traces left by schol- arly documents can be used to assess their reach outside of academia. Our research exam- ine who shared climate change research papers on Twitter by looking at the expressions used in profile descriptions. We categorized users in eight categories (academia, communi- cation, political, professional, personal, organization, bots and publishers) associated to specific expressions. Results indicate how diverse publics may be represented in the com-

munication of scholarly documents on Twitter. Supplementing our word detection analysis with qualitative assessments of the results, we highlight how the presence of unique or multi- ple categorizations in textual Twitter descriptions provides evidence of the publics of research in specific contexts. Our results show a more substantial communication by aca- demics and organizations for papers published in 2016, whereas the general public compar- atively participated more in 2015. Overall, there is significant participation of publics outside of academia in the communication of climate change research articles on Twitter, although the extent to which these publics participate varies between individual papers. This means that papers circulate in specific communities which need to be assessed to understand the reach of research on social media. Furthermore, the flexibility of our method provide means for research assessment that consider the contextuality and plurality of publics involved on Twitter. Introduction In recent years, Twitter became a key platform for the dissemination research [1]. As traces left by scholarly documents in tweets may reflect communication beyond traditional citations PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999 June 3, 2022 1 / 17 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Toupin R, Millerand F, Larivière V (2022) Who tweets climate change papers? investigating publics of research through users’ descriptions. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0268999. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0268999

Editor: Piotr Bro´dka, Politechnika Wroclawska, POLAND Received: May 24, 2021 Accepted: May 13, 2022 Published: June 3, 2022 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999 Copyright: © 2022 Toupin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The code is available on Github (https://github.com/toupinr/ twitterprofiles/blob/master/code_publics/ 20210617_PrepPublicsPropre.R) and aggregated data will be made available upon acceptance.