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Video communication has been rapidly increasing over the past decade, with YouTube providing a medium where users can post, discover, share, and react to videos. There has also been an increase in the number of videos citing research articles, especially since it has become relatively commonplace for academic conferences to require video submissions. However, the relationship between research articles and YouTube videos is not clear, and the purpose of the present paper is to address this issue. We created new datasets using YouTube videos and mentions of research articles on various online platforms. We found that most of the articles cited in the videos are related to medicine and biochemistry. We analyzed these datasets through statistical techniques and visualization, and built machine learning models to predict (1) whether a research article is cited in videos, (2) whether a research article cited in a video achieves a level of popularity, and (3) whether a video citing a research article becomes popular. The best models achieved F1 scores between 80% and 94%. According to our results, research articles mentioned in more tweets and news coverage have a higher chance of receiving video citations. We also found that video views are important for predicting citations and increasing research articles’ popularity and public engagement with science.
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Exploring TikTok as a promising platform for geoscience communication
Abstract. With TikTok emerging as one of the most popular social mediaplatforms, there is significant potential for science communicators tocapitalize on this success and to share their science with a broad, engagedaudience. While videos of chemistry and physics experiments are prominentamong educational science content on TikTok, videos related to thegeosciences are comparatively lacking, as is an analysis of what types ofgeoscience videos perform well on TikTok. To increase the visibility of thegeosciences and geophysics on TikTok and to determine best strategies forgeoscience communication on the app, we created a TikTok account called“Terra Explore” (@TerraExplore). The Terra Explore account is a jointeffort between science communication specialists at UNAVCO, IRIS(Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology), and OpenTopography. Weproduced 48 educational geoscience videos over a 4-month period betweenOctober 2021 and February 2022. We evaluated the performance of each videobased on its reach, engagement, and average view duration to determine thequalities of a successful video. Our video topics primarily focused onseismology, earthquakes, topography, lidar (light detection and ranging),and GPS (Global Positioning System), in alignment with our organizationalmissions. Over this time period, our videos garnered over 2 million totalviews, and our account gained over 12 000 followers. The videos thatreceived the most views received nearly all (∼ 97 %) oftheir views from the For You page, TikTok's algorithmic recommendation feed. Wefound that short videos (< 30 s) had a high average view duration,but longer videos (> 60 s) had the highest engagement rates.Lecture-style videos that were approximately 60 s in length had moresuccess in both reach and engagement. Our videos that received the highestnumber of views featured content that was related to a recent newsworthyevent (e.g., an earthquake) or that explained location-based geology of arecognizable area. Our results highlight the algorithm-driven nature ofTikTok, which results in a low barrier to entry and success for new sciencecommunication creators.
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- PAR ID:
- 10408866
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geoscience Communication
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2569-7110
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 363 to 380
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-5-363-2022
