Critical questions about scientific research publications in the online mask debate

Goodwin, Jean & Ekaterina Bogomoletc. (Forthcoming, 2021). Critical questions about scientific research publications in the online mask debate. In S. Oswald, M. Lewinski, S. Greco & S. Villata (Eds.), The Pandemic of Argumentation. Springer.

How do non-scientists assess and deploy the scientific research articles that are increasingly available through open access publication online? This study tries to find out by analyzing a corpus of 4K Twitter posts from the early months of the COVID pandemic which reference the then-limited research on the efficacy of face masks. In general, identifying a research publication as science seems enough to guarantee it’s quality; in terms of more nuanced assessment, communicators focus on the authoritativeness of a publication more than its epistemic qualities, and often have a good sense of its potential relevance to their decision needs. While this study was based on hand coding of data, it demonstrates the possibilities for large-scale, “macroscopic” analyses of argumentation online.