Expert communication on Twitter: comparing economists and scientists’ social networks, topics and communicative styles

Della Giusta, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3959-4451, Jaworska, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7465-2245 and Vukadinovic Greetham, D. (2021) Expert communication on Twitter: comparing economists and scientists’ social networks, topics and communicative styles. Public Understanding of Science, 30 (1). pp. 75-90. ISSN 1361-6609 doi: 10.1177/0963662520957252

Abstract/Summary

Experts are increasingly using social media to communicate with the wider public, prompted by the need to demonstrate impact and public engagement. While previous research on the use of social media by experts focused on single topics and performed sentiment analysis, we propose to extend the scope by investigating experts' networks, topics and communicative styles. We perform social and semantic network as well language analysis of top tweeting scientists and economists. We find that economists tweet less, mention fewer people and have fewer Twitter conversations with members of the public than scientists. Scientists use a more informal and involved style and engage wider audiences through multimedia contents, while economists use more jargon, and tend to favour traditional written media. The results point to differences in experts’ communicative practices online that might have to do with the disciplinary ways of ‘talking’ posing obstacles to an effective public communication of expert knowledge.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/92297
Identification Number/DOI	10.1177/0963662520957252
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Politics, Economics and International Relations > Economics Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics > Centre for the Mathematics of Human Behaviour (CMOHB)
Uncontrolled Keywords	Twitter, expert communication, communicative style, networks, sentiment, involvement, corpus linguistics, keywords, key terms
Publisher	Sage
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item