Scientific discourse on YouTube: Motivations for citing research in comments

TL;DR

This study explores why YouTube users cite research in comments, revealing motives like providing insights and challenging information, through qualitative analysis of comment content.

Contribution

It offers new insights into the discursive motivations behind citing academic research in YouTube comments, contrasting with scholarly citation reasons.

Findings

Research links are shared mainly to add insights and challenge others.

Commenting behavior on YouTube differs from academic citation practices.

The study provides qualitative understanding of scientific discourse in online comments.

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.