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

Publics in highly tweeted papers We looked at the five most tweeted papers per year to categorize who are users sharing popular scholarly documents about climate change research on Twitter (Table 4). Most papers have between 65 and 75% of the users sharing them assigned to at least one category, except the arti- cle Oxygen isotope in archaeological bioapatites from India: Implications to climate change and decline of Bronze Age Harappan civilization at 46.6%. The representation of users assigned to Academia is lower than the mean of 28% of our dataset for nine out of the ten. Overall, varia- tions between how categories are represented between articles highlight the different contexts in which individual papers are shared, thus providing a basis to assess how and why they get attention. The Ecological networks are more sensitive to plant than to animal extinction under climate change was shared by 47.8% of the accounts assigned to Academia, indicating a significant engagement by the research community. For some papers, the Twitter profiles of users assigned to Academia have important overlap with other categories (S1 Table in S1 File). For example, the paper Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health was tweeted by 27.8% of the Academia assignations overlapping with Professional category. A manual validation of the results indicates that most assignations to Academia indeed represent scholars and researchers, with very few discrepancies. This highlights the potential of word

detection to assess the representation of scholars in a dataset of papers shared on Twitter, at least in terms of precision. However, there is a possibility that scholars were not categorized as such depending on the words used in their Twitter bios. Other methods are better suited to assess overall participation by scholars [3, 57, 58], whereas our method focuses on their partici- pation according to other groups of users. The proportion of users assigned to the Communication category is higher when more users shared a specific paper. Some papers show important overlaps between Communication and Academia such as Ecological networks are more sensitive to plant than to animal extinction under climate change (56%) and Assessing the Performance of EU Nature Legislation in Protect- ing Target Bird Species in an Era of Climate Change (44.4%) (S2 Table in S1 File). There is also large variations for the Communication and Political overlaps, ranging from 2.6% (Climate change impacts on bumblebees converge across continents) to 23.9% (Accelerating extinction risk from climate change), and the Communication and Professional overlaps, ranging from 12.5% (Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change: a modelling study) to 34.2% (Climate change impacts on bumblebees converge across continents). The Per- sonal category has the most overlap with Communication in the most tweeted papers, with no Table 3. Number of Twitter bios with unique of multiple categories.

Type of publics Bots Publishers Organization Communication Political Professional Personal Academia Academia 3 48 1 528 725 656 870 1 628 1 786 Personal 13 35 709 772 852 1 017 1 579 Professional 4 27 674 478 554 710 Political 3 29 474 317 718 Communication 12 55 318 586 Organization 6 110 1 578 Publishers 8 136 Bots 62 The above table presents the absolute number of dual overlaps in individual Twitter profile descriptions per category. Cells in blue present the number of profiles assigned to only one category. Cells at the intersection of two categories present the number of Twitter profiles assigned to both categories. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999.t003 PLOS ONE Who tweets climate change research papers? PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268999 June 3, 2022 9 / 17