Public attention to research on Twitter through storytelling: making a narrative out of tweets to a scientific article

As per the altmetric field, traces left by scholarly documents on social media can be helpful for the evaluation of the societal impact of research. In this study, we explored a storytelling approach based on three methods – network analysis, tweets content analysis and traces interviews – to describe the circulation on Twitter of the paper “Climate change impacts on bumblebees converge across continents” (Kerr et al., 2015). Through this approach, we built a narrative to highlight key events in the dissemination of the Twitter and provide an assessment of its resonance in relation to the communities that engaged with it, for example pollinators conservation organizations or actors of the agricultural sector in Europe. In complementarity with other large-scale methods, the approach developed in our study can provide more contextually based assessments of the public attention to scientific articles, an important endeavour has narrative components become increasingly key to research evaluation.