Scientists Popularizing Science: Characteristics and Impact of TED Talk Presenters

Cassidy R Sugimoto, Mike Thelwall, Vincent Larivière, Andrew Tsou, Philippe Mongeon and Benoit Macaluso

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-8

Abstract: : The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference and associated website of recorded conference presentations (TED Talks) is a highly successful disseminator of science-related videos, claiming over a billion online views. Although hundreds of scientists have presented at TED, little information is available regarding the presenters, their academic credentials, and the impact of TED Talks on the general population. This article uses bibliometric and webometric techniques to gather data on the characteristics of TED presenters and videos and analyze the relationship between these characteristics and the subsequent impact of the videos. The results show that the presenters were predominately male and non-academics. Male-authored videos were more popular and more liked when viewed on YouTube. Videos by academic presenters were more commented on than videos by others and were more liked on YouTube, although there was little difference in how frequently they were viewed. The majority of academic presenters were senior faculty, males, from United States-based institutions, were visible online, and were cited more frequently than average for their field. However, giving a TED presentation appeared to have no impact on the number of citations subsequently received by an academic, suggesting that although TED popularizes research, it may not promote the work of scientists within the academic community.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062403 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 62403&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0062403

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062403

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().