Abstract
Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper's social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user’s followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from nonspecialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints appear to intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist in which extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing the public discourse surrounding scientific research.
Highlights
In the last decade, scientists have flocked to Twitter and other online social media platforms to share their research, connect with colleagues, and engage with the public [1]
The most popular measure of social media attention currently in use is the Altmetric Attention Score, which is calculated as a weighted average of nearly every instance in which an article is referenced on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, along with mentions in news articles, Wikipedia pages, and policy documents
Identifying these “conversation starter” papers is certainly a valuable indicator of research that might lead to tangible impacts on the broader public, but if altmetrics are to be harnessed to meaningfully measure societal impact, we must move beyond the simple question of how much attention an article receives on social media, and prioritize questions of context: Who is engaging with the article, what they are saying about it, and when and where they are doing so [13,15]
Summary
Scientists have flocked to Twitter and other online social media platforms to share their research, connect with colleagues, and engage with the public [1]. Metrics like the Altmetric Attention Score, have been criticized for failing to provide the appropriate context necessary for evaluating societal impact [12,13]. . .the ranking has no bearing on the quality or impact of the research itself” [14] Identifying these “conversation starter” papers is certainly a valuable indicator of research that might lead to tangible impacts on the broader public, but if altmetrics are to be harnessed to meaningfully measure societal impact, we must move beyond the simple question of how much attention an article receives on social media, and prioritize questions of context: Who is engaging with the article, what they are saying about it, and when and where they are doing so [13,15]. Identifying characteristics of nonacademic social media audiences is an important first step in understanding potential societal impacts [16]
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