  The global spread of COVID-19 has caused pandemics to be widely discussed.
This is evident in the large number of scientific articles and the amount of
user-generated content on social media. This paper aims to compare academic
communication and social communication about the pandemic from the perspective
of communication preference differences. It aims to provide information for the
ongoing research on global pandemics, thereby eliminating knowledge barriers
and information inequalities between the academic and the social communities.
First, we collected the full text and the metadata of pandemic-related articles
and Twitter data mentioning the articles. Second, we extracted and analyzed the
topics and sentiment tendencies of the articles and related tweets. Finally, we
conducted pandemic-related differential analysis on the academic community and
the social community. We mined the resulting data to generate pandemic
communication preferences (e.g., information needs, attitude tendencies) of
researchers and the public, respectively. The research results from 50,338
articles and 927,266 corresponding tweets mentioning the articles revealed
communication differences about global pandemics between the academic and the
social communities regarding the consistency of research recognition and the
preferences for particular research topics. The analysis of large-scale
pandemic-related tweets also confirmed the communication preference differences
between the two communities.
