DOI: 10.6071/m3k371
title: Juxtaposition of climate change contrarians and scientists in the media using Media Cloud data

description: We document the media visibility and climate change research achievements
 of two groups of individuals representing some of  the most
 prominent figures in their respective domains: 386  climate
 change contrarians (CCC)  juxtaposed with 386 expert climate
 change scientists (CCS). These data were collected from the Media Cloud
 project (MC), an open data project hosted by the MIT Center for Civic
 Media and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at
 Harvard University. Enclosed are raw MC data and parsed media article data
 files obtained from two types of MC database queries: (i) ~105,000 media
 articles derived from the MC search query ''climate AND change
 AND global AND warming''; (ii) 772 individual  data
 files for each member of the CCC and CCS groups, each derived from a
 single MC search query ''MemberFullName AND climate''.
 These data facilitate the objective comparison of authority in science
 with visibility in digital and print media,  and are used to map
 individuals' association networks within and between CCC and CCS
 groups, at both the group and individual levels.
description: <strong>Selection of individual members of the CCC and CCS
 groups: </strong>Using publicly available records, we created two
 lists of names comprising the CCC and CCS groups – 386 prominent climate
 change contrarians and 386 highly-cited climate change scientists,
 respectively. <strong>Media Cloud (MC)
 data:</strong> We then used the Media Cloud API to download media
 article records associated with each individual by querying the MC
 database for articles including that individual's name and the word
 "climate". All together, we analyzed roughly ~100,000 individual
 media articles. <strong>Web of Science (WOS)
 data: </strong>We downloaded a large dataset of ~ 200,000 articles
 from the WOS "Core Collection" using a database query that
 identified articles associated with the topic "Climate Change".
 Within this set of CC research articles, we then searched for the research
 articles associated with each individual using string matching of coauthor
 names. <strong>Research objective:
 </strong>In the accompanying research article, we juxtapose these
 two groups and compare quantitative measures of scientific authority with
 quantitative measures of visibility in digital and print media – at both
 the group and individual levels. We also map out the associations between
 groups/individuals that are manifest when two individuals appear in the
 same media article or when one individual cites the research article of
 another individual. We aggregate these dyadic relations and visualize the
 resulting association networks within and between CCC and CCS groups, at
 both the group and individual levels.
description: <strong>ReadMe
 file</strong>: The enclosed PDF file
 <strong>ClimateChange-Contrarians-Scientists_DataDescription_ANONYMIZED</strong><strong>.pdf</strong> describes the source and organization of the Article-level and Individual-level (CCC and CCS profiles) variabiles contained in each file. <strong>Source code:</strong> provided in a Mathematica (v11.1) notebook (MediaSource_Annotated_ALL_2256.nb using MediaSource_Annotated_ALL_2256_ANONYMIZED.txt) reproduces the subpanels for Fig. 5 in the following research article - if you use this data please cite: A. M. Petersen, E. M. Vincent, A. L. Westerling (2019) <em>Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians.</em><em> </em> Nature Communications 10, 3502. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09959-4