How Is Scientific Work Referenced in YouTube Videos?

The next session at the Indicators of Social Cohesion symposium starts with the wonderful Katrin Weller, who begins by noting that her institution, GESIS, is now also launching DP-REX, the Data Portal for Racism and Right-Wing Extremism Research. But her talk is actually about assessing the impact of scientific impact through altmetric scores, with a particular focus on the engagement with scientific content that takes place in YouTube videos. The project uses data from Altmetric.com, who identified links to scientific articles in the descriptions of YouTube videos between 2006 and 2017.

The analysis conducted a manual coding of some of the most viewed, commented, liked, or disliked videos, and found, unsurprisingly, that some of the channels that shared scientific work simply represented academics and academic institutions. The most liked, most disliked, most commented, and most viewed videos were posted predominantly by academics with YouTube channels, for instance.

Opinionated, religious, and political channels were also well-represented – topics such as domestic and international politics, climate change, conspiracy theories, and other major topics were often connected to scholarly content. Nutrition and fitness videos also sometimes shared selected scientific work that they claimed supported their lifestyle recommendations.

Academics and scientific publishers referenced a broad range of low- and high-impact publications (probably largely because they promoted their own content); uncategorisable channels generally promoted much less-cited content, pointing potentially to a cherry-picking of obscure work that supported their views.

In some of the comment threads attached to these videos, further scientific content was also shared, both to challenge the original content or to ask for more explanation.