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

mainly on the presence or absence of specific expressions. This allows for flexibility to assess who tweets different sets of documents as context is dynamic. However, choices need to be made clear to provide interpretation about how specific expressions are used in various con- texts. Moreover, some categories may need to be revisited for further development or be assessed in conjunction with other methods, such as distinguishing between individuals or organizations or detecting accounts posting automated content [46]. Despite these caveats, this study present elements to assess the potential publics of climate change research on Twitter by taking context into account. We see how individual documents are shared beyond strict scholarly communities and in specific groups. Our results, while focusing on highly tweeted papers about climate change, indicate that academia is the main group involved, but that specific papers also reach a variety of publics, whether professional, political and personal, depending on the context in which they are shared. The method we deployed is readily usable across large sets of documents, flexible in that words and categories may be modulated and refined according to research objectives, and provide key insights about ‘who’ tweets research on Twitter. It may also be used in conjunction with other methods to further describe these assessments as well as provide statistical or qualitative observations to what is observed. By focusing on the Twitter descriptions of users, we can work directly with

identity markers chosen by users on Twitter. Future research may refine the choices made building this tool. Overall, it serves as a step for future work about who tweets research docu- ment in conjonction with other methods, such as social network analysis [32]. It also provides new elements to contextualize the reach of scholarly documents on Twitter. Conclusion This study focused on the categorization of users sharing climate change research papers on Twitter by using a word detection method based on profile descriptions. While our results do not provide a direct assessment of who tweet research due to the characteristics of identity markers in Twitter profile descriptions, it provides insights about how documents may perme- ate outside of academia and in various communities. Focusing on a subset of highly tweeted papers about climate change, we see how different group of users share research papers on Twitter. As such, we provide information about who tweets individual documents to further describe the specific contexts in which this research circulates. We proposed a framework that is flexible as we presented one set of categories and expression. These may be easily changed, based on qualitative assessment, to assess different group of users in other Twitter scholarly communication research. Moreover, moving between automated word analysis and qualitative assessment helps inform the interpretations of who is represented through these groups. As such, it highlights how contextual observations will help to better inform the reach of research documents on social media.

Supporting information S1 File. (ZIP) Acknowledgments We would like to thank Stefanie Haustein and Juan Pablo Alperin from the ScholCommLab for their help and feedback regarding the analysis. We would also like to thank Matisse Dagen- ais and Sandrine Dagenais in helping build the codebook. PLOS ONE Who tweets climate change research papers? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999 June 3, 2022 13 / 17