A DECADE OF SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION ON TED TALKS : A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Researchers involved in communicating their works with the general public and other scientists for various reasons, including but not limited to citations, publications, or funding. Robert K Merton identified four norms of science: universalism, communalism, organized skepticism and disinterestedness. These norms of science point out that all researchers with the same credentials must receive equal recognition. However, there is bias in gender or race and affects various aspects of a researcher’s career. Social media is gaining popularity in the scientific realm, where the recent happenings can reach a wider community than earlier. TED talks are one platform that invites various subject matter experts to share their knowledge and discoveries with the audience and make this available online. This study aims to understand the socio-demographic characteristics and scientific impact of researchers who appear on TED talk compared to a larger population. For this purpose, the dataset was taken from TED talks and the Web of Science database. And various algorithms were adopted for author disambiguation purposes. Also, the socio-demographic variables (country of affiliation, organization, gender) were considered independent variables. A binomial logistic regression model was used to predict the chances of appearing on TED talk and the correlation of the variables. From the study, it was seen that the Mathew effect, as defined by Robert K Merton, is seen to take place on the TED talk platform as the majority of researchers who appear on the TED platform were male researchers affiliated to top universities in the United States. Additionally, the prediction analysis also showed that the chances of appearing on TED talks decreases when a researcher is from other continents apart from North America, Female researchers, universities that do not belong to the top 100 universities globally. Thus, by showing that the researchers who are at the peak of their career get more recognition when compared to the rest. Further, this acts as a base for various platforms such as TED to understand and widen the category of guests to participate on their platform.