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

Methodologically, word detection highlights which expressions users provide in their Twit- ter descriptions. It contributes to our understanding of scholarly communication on social media by assessing how different identity markers may be used within single bios and the com- munities linked to these expressions. However, it elicits methodological discussions as our approach does not aim to attach unique identity markers to accounts, but rather highlights the multiple ways through which users may express themselves on Twitter. Our paper addresses these considerations by investigating who share climate change research articles through a word detection method of Twitter bios. Thus, we aim to provide insights on how users present themselves to others in climate change research discussions, especially outside of academia. Material and methods Data collection and Twitter metrics For this study, we built a dataset of 2015 and 2016 research articles (n = 4 730) indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) of Clarivate Analytics through the internal database of the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST). We then collected tweets containing a link to these papers as well as information about the users who published these tweets by cross-referencing the information gathered from WoS with the Altmetric–a division of Digital Science (Springer) tracking scholarly documents on social media–database via the Digital Object Iden- tifier (DOI). We accessed the database through an October 2017 copy provided to the Obser-

vatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST). We used data from the WoS database as it indexes a large number of research documents from several fields as well as extensive biblio- metric information about said research documents [59]. However, attention is directed to a specific set of scientific literature published in English [60]. To select relevant papers about cli- mate change research, we focused on those published in 2015 in 2016 that included the key- words “climate change”, “global warming” or “IPCC” in the title and for which a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), a unique identifier referencing online documents was provided. We chose the years as the Paris Agreement, approved on 12 December 2015, marks a critical juncture for science communication and climate change engagement [35, 37]. Since Altmetric information was provided through a data dump in October 2017, they also were the latest years for which we had coverage of all the research articles through both years at the time of data collection in September 2018. We focused on the title as it is a direct metadata to assess a paper relevance [39]. It is also the information that appears the most in tweets sharing a link to a paper. This query does not retrieve all publications in climate change research; rather, we wanted to collect a set of papers directly related to climate change. As such, our aim is not to provide an exten- sive analysis of the field, as is done elsewhere [33, 61]. Data collected includes the paper DOI,

title, abstract, name of first author, journal of publication, NSF discipline and specialty, num- ber of pages, number of references, number of authors, number of citations, number of tweets, number of accounts, time of first and last tweet, and tweetspan. Collected tweets metadata include paper DOI, tweet author ID, tweet ID, tweet content, time of publication and retweet order. User information include, at the time of tweet, the author ID, author name, account description, account URL, geographic stamp, number of followers, number of papers tweeted, number of tweets, time of first and last tweet, and tweetspan. Queries to the WoS and Alt- metric database were made in SQL and we exported the results for further access. Data collec- tion complied with the terms and conditions of WoS, Altmetric and Twitter through data providing agreements with the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST). Following recommendations from previous studies, we computed several Twitter metrics to further describe our dataset for tweet activity [1, 4]. Computed metrics include the number of papers tweeted, number of tweets, Twitter coverage (i.e., % of tweeted papers), Twitter PLOS ONE Who tweets climate change research papers? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999 June 3, 2022 5 / 17