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Word Diffusion and Climate Science

Bentley, R.A.; Garnett, P.; O'Brien, M.J.; Brock, W.A.

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Authors

R.A. Bentley

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 29, 2024
Journal PLoS ONE
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

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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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