Scientific discourse on YouTube: Motivations for citing research in comments
arXiv:2405.12798 · doi:10.1002/pra2.754
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.
Accepted at the Association for Information Science and Technology
References in corpus (3)
- Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-citation across Fields and over Time
- Grand challenges in altmetrics: heterogeneity, data quality and dependencies
- Does the public discuss other topics on climate change than researchers? A comparison of explorative networks based on author keywords and hashtags