Science communication on Twitter : Ananalysis of vocabulary and content

Abstract: Twitter is one platform where scientists can communicate their research results, both among each other and to a wider audience. This master thesis investigates to what extent, and by which means, tweets with scientific content invite the general public to engage in the topics. The four different topics analysed in this study were: C.elegans/Neuromyelitis, Staphylococcus, mRNA expression and Species diversity/Phylogenetic tree. Several methods were used to analyse these datasets, such as identification of jargon, content analysis and word frequencies, analysed within the metadiscourse framework stance and engagement. All in order to detect any intentions of communication outside the academic circle. It was possible to detect communicative and descriptive content in two of the topics, mRNA expression and Species diversity/Phylogenetic tree. The vocabulary was analysed in both of these topics, detecting a high frequency of reader-mentions and markers for novelty, something that has been seen in other kinds of media producing popular science. However, for most tweets with scientific content the main receivers seem to be other researchers in the same fields. Tweets containing links to scientific articles predominantly contain only the title of the article. One prominent aspect of Twitter is its changing nature. This can be seen in this study where tweets from the topics Staphylococcus and Species diversity/Phylogenetic tree had links to news media. If the datasets were collected today, tweets from the topic mRNA expression would probably also display this pattern.