Altmetrics for the identification of scientific controversies: The case of NeuroGenderings and neurosexism

Abstract

This work presents a methodological proposal for the analysis of social controversies related to scientific literature. This methodology consists of three clearly differentiated parts. First, we identify the cognitive structure of a set of scientific works. To do this, a historiogram is created through the analysis of references cited by seminal works. This allows us to expand the set of works to work with, subsequently conducting a co-word analysis to identify the cognitive structure of the scientific field to be explored. Secondly, we obtain social mentions of this scientific literature using so-called altmetrics. This allows us to extract mentions made to each scientific document from non-academic environments. Finally, we apply sentiment analysis techniques to these mentions to identify focal points of negative sentiment. We test this methodology on the case study of NeuroGenderings, a movement in the field of neuroscience that denounces the lack of scientific evidence in works that claim the existence of brain differences driven by the biological sex of the subjects. Our results confirm the viability of these types of approaches that enable the identification of research areas with greater controversy. Although our study is limited to the analysis of controversies in news, blogs, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Reddit, the methodology can be applied to other domains and social platforms.