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

density (i.e., number of tweets per paper) and intensity (i.e., number of tweets per tweeted paper), number of users, user density (number of users per paper) and intensity (i.e., number of users per tweeted paper), number of papers retweeted, retweet coverage (i.e.,% of retweeted papers), share of retweets (i.e., % of tweets that are retweets), retweet density (i.e., number of retweets per paper), and retweet intensity (i.e. number of retweets per tweeted document). These metrics further characterize our dataset by providing an assessment of Twitter engage- ment across scholarly and social media objects. We computed all metrics by uploading our dataset in an R dataframe and handling it using the tidyverse package as well as basic calcula- tion functions [62]. Plots were created using the ggplot2 package [63]. Our dataset includes 2 376 papers published in 2015 and 2 354 in 2016. The papers were published in 1 062 journals, from which 46 have published more than 20. The journals Cli- matic Change (n = 178), PLOS ONE (n = 139), Global Change Biology (n = 97), Regional Envi- ronmental Change (n = 70), Scientific Reports (n = 63), Environmental Research Letters (n = 55), Journal of Climate (n = 54) and Nature Climate Change (n = 51) each have published more than 50 articles. This illustrates how climate change research is a broad field encompass- ing various disciplines, as well as showing the diverse possibilities of publication whether in specialized or more general journals. We collected information from 41 108 tweets–among

which 23 831 were retweets–sent by 21 844 unique accounts linking to 2 628 papers. The 56% Twitter coverage of our dataset is comparable to that of medical and health research and aver- age of more than eight users sharing tweeted papers indicate significant engagement toward the papers gathered in our study (1). Among tweeted papers, 1 961 were shared by at least two users, 667 by more than ten, 338 by more than twenty, 129 by more than fifty, and 47 by over than a hundred user. Also, 1 319 and 1 308 papers published respectively in 2015 and 2016 were shared at least once, for 21 985 and 19 349 tweets by 12 815 and 11 461 unique users. Tweeted papers were published in 646 journals, 16 of which published more than 20 papers. Climatic Change, PLOS ONE and Global Change Biology published most tweeted papers, whereas Nature Climate Change, Science and PNAS account for the three journals publishing the most papers tweeted by more than a hundred users (Fig 1). Fig 1. Distribution of climate change research tweeted papers in scientific journals. Depicted in the above histogram are the ten journals that published the most tweeted papers in our dataset, and below are the ten journals that published the most papers tweeted by more than 100 users. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999.g001 PLOS ONE Who tweets climate change research papers? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999 June 3, 2022 6 / 17