Twitter isn’t perhaps the first place that springs to mind when you think about scientific discussion, yet social media engagement is an increasingly important part of the modern researcher’s toolkit.

A key part of effective communication is understanding your audience, so new research from the University of Washington School of Medicine should prove interesting. The researchers examined discussions around scientific research on Twitter to understand who is talking about science and in what way are they doing so.

The researchers highlight how we tend to interact with those of a like mind online, so those in our social network will tend to have similar characteristics, including interests, occupation, age, and race.  It’s what’s referred to as “network homophily”, and allowed the researchers to describe the total audience for any particular research paper by bringing together the various interest groups that are discussing it.

Understanding the market

The researchers attempted to go beyond simple groupings, such as “scientist” and “non-scientist”, and the descriptions people use to describe themselves on Twitter allowed them to create quite detailed segments.  For instance, scientists were put into their specific discipline, whether that’s bioinformatics or evolutionary biology.

Among the non-scientists, these were further segmented into groups often based around their interests, whether that was mental health, cryptocurrencies, religion, politics, or journalism.  This allowed the researchers to understand the kind of people who were discussing each paper.  Their findings highlight how the actual audience may not be quite who the scientists would have in mind.

For instance, hundreds of papers had a primary audience on Twitter of groups such as white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and science denialists.  Indeed, in the worst cases, half of the audience for some studies consisted of such groups, thus highlighting the cultural and political environment science exists within.

Indeed, the researchers highlight how the study itself has been conducted in the context of a COVID-19 pandemic in which science has been polarized and misappropriated.  They believe their findings, therefore, highlight the importance of the science community understanding how their work is used so they can intervene accordingly and work to ensure that the public is as well-informed as possible.