Public Engagement with Science via Twitter: What topics do scientists and the public care about most during COVID-19?

Liu, Jieli; Hara, Noriko

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115177 Copy

Description

Title

Public Engagement with Science via Twitter: What topics do scientists and the public care about most during COVID-19?

Author(s)

• Liu, Jieli
• Hara, Noriko

Contributor(s)

Sanfilippo, Madelyn

Issue Date

2022-10-29

Keyword(s)

• Science Communication
• Public Engagement with Science

Abstract

This study investigated whether knowledge regarding COVID shared by scientists aligned with the topics that interest the public. By applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for the topic modeling, we extracted topics from the tweets posted by scientists during three periods of time between 2020 and 2021 and examined how the topics changed over time. We also compared the topics extracted from general tweets to the topics extracted from tweets with high public engagement levels to examine whether topics from scientists’ tweets align well with the public’s interests. We found that scientists and the public have different foci on COVID-19 discussions on Twitter; the public was generally more concerned about issues which directly affect their daily lives while scientists’ interests do not have these same characteristics.

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115177

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