R.A. Bentley
Word Diffusion and Climate Science
Bentley, R.A.; Garnett, P.; O'Brien, M.J.; Brock, W.A.
Authors
P. Garnett
M.J. O'Brien
W.A. Brock
Abstract
As public and political debates often demonstrate, a substantial disjoint can exist between the findings of science and the impact it has on the public. Using climate-change science as a case example, we reconsider the role of scientists in the information-dissemination process, our hypothesis being that important keywords used in climate science follow “boom and bust” fashion cycles in public usage. Representing this public usage through extraordinary new data on word frequencies in books published up to the year 2008, we show that a classic two-parameter social-diffusion model closely fits the comings and goings of many keywords over generational or longer time scales. We suggest that the fashions of word usage contributes an empirical, possibly regular, correlate to the impact of climate science on society.
Citation
Bentley, R., Garnett, P., O'Brien, M., & Brock, W. (2012). Word Diffusion and Climate Science. PLoS ONE, 7(11), Article e47966. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047966
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Nov 7, 2012 |
Deposit Date | Nov 8, 2012 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 31, 2014 |
Journal | PLoS ONE |
Electronic ISSN | 1932-6203 |
Publisher | Public Library of Science |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 7 |
Issue | 11 |
Article Number | e47966 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047966 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1501432 |
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Copyright Statement
© 2012 Bentley et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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