Have You Seen This? Why Political Pundits Share Scholarly Research on Social Media

Abstract

<jats:p>Background A healthy public sphere requires a flow of reliable, trustworthy, and accurate information. Scholarly research is one such source but, to be most effective, it must reach the public. One possible dissemination route for that material is political pundits. Analysis We extracted the tweets of thirty-two Canadian pundits with links to scholarly research and studied the main motivations for sharing a link to a scholarly article. Conclusion and implications We found that most pundits we studied tweeted at least one link to a scholarly article and that the motivations for sharing varied. However, our sample shared links to scholarly journal articles infrequently. Résumé Contexte Pour bien fonctionner, une sphère publique requiert un flux d’informations qui soient fiables, dignes de confiance et précises. La recherche savante est une source de telles informations, mais pour être efficace elle doit rejoindre le public. Une façon de disséminer la recherche consiste à recourir à des commentateurs politiques. Analyse Nous avons passé en revue les gazouillis de 32 commentateurs canadiens ayant des liens avec la recherche savante et nous avons étudié leurs motivations principales pour partager un lien vers un article savant. Conclusion et implications Nous avons découvert que la plupart des commentateurs de notre échantillon ont inclus au moins un lien vers un article savant dans leurs gazouillis et que leurs motivations pour le faire étaient diverses. Cependant, ces commentateurs ne partageaient pas souvent des liens vers des articles paraissant dansdes revues savantes.</jats:p>

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

“…Authors and publishers may tweet links to their papers to promote them, and eventually foster engagement that will benefit them–such as an higher number of citations–whereas scholars may tweet or retweet documents they find relevant [ 3 ]. Altogether, users who actively engage with a paper may do so by being prompted by other accounts, whether because a publication was relevant, funny or controversial [ 42 , 43 ]. Influential users, such as communicators or celebrities, may engage their network more easily, while communities may be created around specific documents to topics [ 4 , 44 ].…”