YouTube has become one of the largest websites on the Internet. Among its many genres, both professional and amateur science communicators compete for audience attention. This article provides the first overview of science communication on YouTube and examines content factors that affect the popularity of science communication videos on the site. A content analysis of 390 videos from 39 YouTube channels was conducted. Although professionally generated content is superior in number, user-generated content was significantly more popular. Furthermore, videos that had consistent science communicators were more popular than those without a regular communicator. This study represents an important first step to understand content factors, which increases the channel and video popularity of science communication on YouTube.

YouTube has become the second most popular web search engine (see Alexa.com ) and the primary website for individuals and organisations to freely distribute video content. Popularity statistics indicate that Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics-related content is of significant interest to YouTube audiences, yet analysis of the 391 most popular science, engineering and mathematics-themed channels reveals a conspicuous absence of female communicators, with the hosts of just 32 of these channels presenting as female. To help understand potential causes of this gap, analysis was conducted on popularity indicators and audience sentiments of 450 videos from 90 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics-related channels. Female hosted channels were found to accumulate more comments per view, and significantly higher proportions of appearance, hostile, critical/negative and sexist/sexual commentary.

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Demand on researchers to justify the impact of their work outside academia is increasing. Both increasing research use in policy and measuring current use are multi-faceted problems, though there are many potential benefits to researchers and policymakers alike. This bibliometric study aimed to gain insight into the research and reference practices of Australian policymakers, and investigate how this approach compares to previous interview and survey studies. We analysed 4649 references from 80 government publications from eight departments from 2010 to 2017, including references to 1836 articles from peer-reviewed journals, noting each author, title, year, parent publication, source type and access level. The number and type of evidence sourced varied per publication, with the most common sources being peer-reviewed journal articles, federal government reports, and Australian business information. This differs from previous large-scale qualitative studies which found policymakers are most likely to speak directly to colleagues for information, and far less inclined to seek out academic research. The study also found a possible increased chance for academic research to be cited if it was open access. Despite criticisms of citation analysis, at least in the field of research utilisation we cannot solely rely on interview or survey data, as cited evidence use differs from reported evidence use. Both the characteristics of evidence sources in policy and the effect of open access publishing on research use in policy are clearly worth investigating further, particularly longitudinally, which would require increased accessibility of government publications.