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

Textual analysis of Twitter profile descriptions To understand how climate change research permeate outside of academia, we focused on the textual analysis of these descriptions. Specifically, we looked at specific expressions that indi- cate how users present themselves on Twitter [28]. As such, our analysis does not aim to pro- vide an exact mapping of the scientists or journalists on Twitter [57, 64]. Rather, we understand expressions in Twitter descriptions as a proxy to investigate the potential reach of scholarly documents outside of academia. We looked at Twitter descriptions using a dictionary of expressions for eight relevant categories of identity markers built on previous research [5, 16, 28, 51] (Table 1). We built a first version of the codebook by manually coding a sample of a thousand descriptions, and we then improved it through several iterations of the analysis, run- ning the code, comparing with our manual coding, and then modifying the codebook accord- ingly. We removed all accounts with no descriptions (NULL), lowered all cases, and removed numbers, URLS, emojis, stopwords and punctuation signs except for the hash (#) and at signs (@) from all remaining descriptions. Our inputted data frame featured one user per paper per row, and we removed duplicates as we filtered down our analysis. We assigned expressions to categories using the tidyverse packages and then matching them with corresponding words in the descriptions [62]. Our method may assign more than one category to a description, and

thus considers the possibility for someone to provide multiple identity markers. We completed our analysis by looking at the table of descriptions sorted in different categories to assess the potential representations of users mobilizing specific words. We organized our specific obser- vations by looking at the coverage of these categories in 10 highly tweeted papers. Thus, we describe how well these categories may be investigated in studies about the communication of research on Twitter, specifically climate change research. We provided a category to 70% of Twitter bios for this study. Unidentified descriptions include those not written in English or French–language for which we were sufficiently fluent–and those not specific enough to be matched to one of our categories. Table 1. Categories and matching expressions used for textual analysis of Twitter descriptions. Categories Ex. of specific expressions Ex. of Twitter descriptions Academia researcher, professor, phd, biologist, postdoc Post-doctoral coastal scientist / engineer @unisouthampton, UK. Researches #sealevelrise #impacts #adaptation #islands #deltas. Also likes #cows. Personal yoga, music, father, mother, cat Curious, Mother of two, Retired. Professional physician, manager, engineer, strategist, veterinarian Environmental attorney. Climate change terrifies me. Political advocate, policy, councillor, social justice, #standupforscience Mayor of @CityKitchener. Community promoter of Kitchener & @WRAwesome-ness. Past Prez of @FCM_online. Treasurer of @uclg_org. Motto: Live ~ Love ~ Laugh

Communication journalist, writer, author, podcast, youtuber Journaliste, directrice de la re´daction de @Sante_Magazine. Mes tweets n’engagent que moi. Compte perso Organization university, institue, media, association, research centre Updates from AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open minds. Join us. http://tinyurl.com/JoinAAAS Publishers Wiley, Sage, Elsevier, issn, journal Published by Oxford University Press, AoB PLANTS features peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of environmental and evolutionary plant biology. Bots bots, RSS, paper alerts, retweets from, daily updates A Bots tweeting new research from the Canadian Government (NRC, AAFC, EC, DFO & NRCan). Not affiliated the Government of Canada Unassigned An unknown particle in this Universe The above table presents the categories used in our study with a selection of five correspondings expressions and an example of Twitter profile descriptions. The complete list of expressions can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8236598.v3 and https://github.com/toupinr/twitterprofiles/blob/master/code_publics/ 20210617_PrepPublicsPropre.R [65]. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999.t001 PLOS ONE Who tweets climate change research papers? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999 June 3, 2022 7 / 17