Scientific Discourse on YouTube: Motivations for Citing Research in Comments

Abstract

YouTube is a valuable source of user‐generated content on a wide range of topics, and it encourages user participation through the use of a comment system. Video content is increasingly addressing scientific topics, and there is evidence that both academics and consumers use video descriptions and video comments to refer to academic research and scientific publications. Because commenting is a discursive behavior, this study will provide insights on why individuals post links to research publications in comments. For this, a qualitative content analysis and iterative coding approach were applied. Furthermore, the reasons for mentioning academic publications in comments were contrasted with the reasons for citing in scholarly works and with reasons for commenting on YouTube. We discovered that the primary motives for sharing research links were (1) providing more insights into the topic and (2) challenging information offered by other commentators.

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“…The use of online science videos (either pre-recorded or live streamed) has emerged as an especially engaging way to make research content more accessible, allowing direct, global access to science-related content, as well as facilitating a more interactive dialogue between science producers, mediators and science consumers (Smith, 2018;Boy, et al, 2020;Striewski, et al, 2022;Shaikh, et al, 2023).…”

“…As a global, online video-sharing service (primarily oriented to pre-recorded content), the use of YouTube as a platform for the dissemination of science has increased notably (Amarasekara and Grant, 2019;Shaikh, et al, 2023;Yang, et al, 2022). Its international and inter-generational audiences (Thelwall, 2018), diverse content (Striewski, et al, 2022), social media features (Tsou, et al, 2014;Allgaier, 2020;Shaikh, et al, 2023), permanent access (Elberzhager, et al, 2022) and reach (Maynard, 2021) mean YouTube is a suitable tool for social media academic metrics, or "popularity" metrics (Yang, et al, 2022).…”

“…For this motive, YouTube has been extensively used as a data source, covering such topics as the specific features of science videos (Morcillo, et al, 2016;Welbourne and Grant, 2016), the output-level impact of science videos Yang, et al, 2022), the characteristics of science video presenters , analyses of science video comments (Tsou, et al, 2014;Striewski, et al, 2022), gender studies (Thelwall and Mas-Bleda, 2018;Amarasekara and Grant, 2019), categories of science videos (Kousha, et al, 2012), science video audiences (Boy, et al, 2020), best practices in making science videos (Beautemps and Bresges, 2021;Elberzhager, et al, 2022) or promoting research projects (Davies, 2019), and discussions centred on controversial issues, such as fracking (Jaspal, et al, 2014), genomics (Harris, et al, 2014), vaccination (Donzelli, et al, 2018), climate change (Shapiro and Park, 2015;Allgaier, 2019) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Orduña-Malea, et al, 2020). In addition, the use of YouTube by research organizations, especially universities (Martín-González and Llarena, 2017;Meseguer-Martinez, et al, 2019;Ros-Gálvez, et al, 2021).…”